Ahssistant
Description:
Ahssistant is a Discord bot that, when added to a Discord server, prints and audibly says the weather in Amherst. It also serves as a basic calculator.
Inspiration:
Two of our team members are frequent users of Discord, and thought a bot that tells weather would be convenient. The other member just really wanted to feel acomplished so he made a calculator in the bot.
What it does:
When added to a Discord server, Ahssistant will check user messages in the text channels to see if the first word of their message is "!ahmed". If it is, it will check if the second word is "weather". If it is, Ahmed will print the current weather in Amherst, as well as join the voice channel the user is currently in and say the weather in the voice of group member Ahmed. If the second word is "calculate", the bot will check the next part of the message, which is intended to be a basic operation, and print the result of that operation.
How we built it:
We built it by callaborating on GitHub using IntelliJ IDEA.
Challenges we ran into:
The main challenge we faced was getting the bot to say the voice clips in the queue. For example, if the temperature is 42 degrees, the audio file for both "forty" and "two", must play. This required a lot of thought and many exceptions had to be coded. Another challenge two of the members faced was how to make the calculator print out the answer as an integer if the answer is a whole number (Ex. making 2.0 into 2)
Accomplishments that we're proud of:
The accomplishment we are most proud of is that Ahssistant works exactly as originally intended. We are also proud that we were able to make the bot in the first place, as two of our team members are novice programmers.
What we learned:
We learned how to collaborate as a team using GitHub, as two of our team members had never done so before. One team member learned how Discord bots work. All members learned how to code better overall such as with making the calculator and/or the weather program.
What's next:
Future plans for the Ahssistant include making it work with other cities besides Amherst and giving a weather related tip. Another possible fun feature is giving it the ability to say randomized fun facts and tips that are unrelated to the weather. A last possible feature would be to expand the calculator so it can do more advanced calculations.
Built with:
We built it with IntelliJ IDEA, Maven, and libraries for Discord and Yahoo! Weather.
Prizes we're going for:
Arteck HB030 Portable Keyboard