A joke project I made for my friends, consisting of a a chat-bot in our group message which utilizes a custom made server
May 2018 - Aug 2018 — Durham, North Carolina
Repositories
— mra-server-pythonOverview:
A joke iOS application to send alerts to a group message
Each message would then be accompanied by a timestamp as well as coordinates of the individual sending them. The message would be parsed outputted properly in a message format. Audio files would be uploaded to Google Drive, and a shareable link is generated. Morse code messages were in the form of text, where client-side Morse code audio 'beeps' are concatenated and uploaded to Google Drive, again with shareable links generated.
Fig 1: Message with text, where Neil is tired
Fig 2: Audio message, where I sent something with Morse code
All of the messages would be sent in a specified format to an email for server to pick up push to the group message. Each email would contain the message information as well as coordinate information. The message information was compiled the following way:
The server which was used to intercept these messages was a Raspberry Pi running a script, where on push notifications on incoming emails. Unfortunately it was extremely complex to purely use 3rd party Python libraries to work with the audio files, so I used Google's Gmail and Spreadsheet API's to parse the email upon reception, download the audio file in a specific folder and proper name, get the shareable link, append the message information as well as the Google Drive link in the spreadsheet, read the spreadsheet from the Raspberry Pi, and THEN send it to the group message. It was quite convoluted, but it worked with little latency.
The chat bot aspect came into play later on, when I was messing around with ways to interact with Google Hangouts. There is no Google Hangouts API available, so I had to use a very well made 3rd party Python library where Google Hangouts was essentially reverse engineered (see my GitHub the citation). I then realised that I was able to not only send messages, but read them. I can read a users name, email, timestamp, message, etc., and with this information, I decided to make a chat bot which parses a message, and if it sees a message command (we used exclamation point, e.g. !command) then it would parse the command and respond appropriately. Here are some examples of what it was able to accomplish:
Fig 3: !help lists all available commands (at the time)
Fig 4: !hello says hello to the user
Fig 5: !8ball, a very popular command
Fig 6: !define defines a word, and !uptime showed the server uptime
Personal Statement:
This project was purely intended for joking purposes, but it ended up being a quite complex project so I decided to include it. One of my friends, studying archeology, had an excavation in Peru the summer of 2018. Never having been abroad, I decided to construct an iOS application for his phone where he can send 'alerts' to our group message if he is ever in 'trouble' in the ways outlined in Overview. Of course, any one of my friends could download it and have fun with it. Unfotunately, Apple was extremely stringnent on having this app available publically on the AppStore (for obvious reasons). I could still install the app onto any iOS device via my computer, but it would only function for a period of (if I remember correctly) 2 weeks. So my buddy was able to use it for a while before Apple prevented the app from launching again.
To get the iOS side of things working, I still required a server to run to intercept these messages. In addition, you can tell from Overview that I was experimenting with scripting for Google Hangouts, so the project morphed into including a chat bot as well. The server would pick up on push notifications from a certain group message, and respond a certain way depending on the different commands sent.
The iOS application icon ended up looking like this:
