MoodBot Progress Report

Meeting in the MakerSpace once more with Eddie proved to be a much needed meeting for us. Aware of probable faults with our project, especially in regards to the Twitter capabilities, we sought out the help from Lauren, one of the professionals in the space. She brought us to a step-by-step guide on the library webpage to set up the SparkFun board to internet. We were able to establish a connection, but could not get the connection to hold. This brought us to another dead end. Rachel and I had several pieces of the code (the test Twitter library, the temperature sensor code, and a few others) but we do not understand how to seamlessly weave them together. Lauren was a huge help though, suggesting we buy longer female and male cords to make sure the wearable device is separated far enough from the board (roughly going to cost us around $5) and emailing us the schedule of Aaron, another expert in the MakerSpace who knows more in depth about the SparkFun boards. Unfortunately with midterms the week after meeting with Lauren, Rachel was the only one with free time to meet with Aaron — although, this works really well because Rachel knows a good amount about the actual code and the interface. In her time with Aaron, Rachel was able to gain connectivity to Twitter, a huge milestone in our project.

We ran into significant trouble concerning the wifi board with Sparkfun originally, but we managed to run some sample code with it. However, concerning Twitter, there was an issue—the wifi board wouldn’t be able to tweet through the non-protected wifi of the Makerspace because Twitter requires a secure network connection, and integrating the Sparkfun wifi board code with the twitter code was proving to be complex. After working with Aaron in the Makerspace (recommended by Lauren due to his experience with Arduino and the wifi board), we decided to try another route—a program called Processing, which is open source program available online. Using a Twitter library and an Arduino library with Processing, we would be able to have the Sparkfun board send the results of the temperature sensor to the Processing program on the computer, which would then run the Twitter code to send out a tweet.

Deciding this would be a simpler way to run the project, we downloaded the Twitter library for Processing and went through the authentication process using that and twitter.dev to give the program permission to read & write. After tweaking the code, we were able to get a few sample tweets to work. We also looked into the Arduino library and the Ardunio_input code, which is what we would use to have the temperature sensor send information back to Processing, where we’d integrate the codes so that different temperatures would prompt a different tweet to be sent out, depending on mood. The next step for us is to begin work on the Arduino temperature sensor code that would work with the Processing codes.