Local Circle | Devpost

Eww, disposable bottles.

Inspiration

We wanted to use the tools provided to create a tool to make it easier for people to find volunteer opportunities, neighbors in need, and a fun bot to chat with as an interface.

What it does

Currently the LocalCircle Twitter bot will offer you volunteer opportunities when you're #bored and when you need #help it can help you reach out to your neighbors.

How we built it

Our application is hosted on an Azure Virtual Machine, built with Angular and Python it utilizes the Tweepy wrapper for Twitter's API to give us a way to reach out to the world.

Challenges we ran into

Yes, the project was started with considerable struggle as we attempted to deploy Angular (TypeScript) on a Node.JS web server. At the same time, we were trying to connect a database to the Angular frontend. After some refactoring, we were able to come up with a slightly different stack that worked much better for us and allowed us to continue working on other things.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Continue to work through the struggle, learning some basics of a web-deployment and bringing different technologies together on the cloud. Some major accomplishments include setting up the server, making the bot quote and respond to tweets, and the bot be able to recognize plastic vs non-plastic bottles.

What we learned

Our team learned how to make a web server with Azure combined with both Node.js and Flask. Afterwards, we learned how to make a twitter bot using Tweepy and how to run a developer account. Additionally, we learned how to utilize Microsoft's CustomVision.AI website to build a image classifier and then integrating that with the twitter bot to offer an interesting interaction for people interfacing with our bot.

What's next for Local Circle

Long-term, we seek to add more hashtag features to the bot, expand our bots' ability to recognize environmentally friendly/unfriendly objects, and finish our website by adding many ways for the consumer to volunteer and serve. In order to do so, we want to build a web-scraper to collect data from the web to offer a diverse collection of information to our users. Additionally, we plan to build a more automated bot that is able to reach out to more people and keep them engaged with their communities.