LookOwt

Inspiration

Almost every student in today's era has a Facebook account. Because of this, Facebook Messenger chat bots are low hassle, easily accessible utilities that are soon to be the future for our generation.

Taking inspiration from already existing Messenger bots, such as "Hi Poncho", the weather bot was a big inspiration to kickstart our own.

Similarly, the college struggle to keep track of class assignments has increased as business ensues, hence creating the idea for this project.

What it does

This bot reads course syllabus' and schedules, then stores important dates to a database where it can remind the user in advance before any of the assignments are due. It also allows users input to add and edit their own classes and is flexible to accommodate for classes that require more than just a syllabus.

How we built it

We used AWS EC2, to host an Apache web server, under a Domain.com domain, and a Namecheap certificate, to connect the Facebook API with a server-side PHP application that utilizes a MySQL database, and a Java file parser.

Challenges we ran into

Facebook required a verified certificate with our bot's connection. Which began a 12-hour endeavor to get our own certified domain without spending any money (because we're broke). We got that SSL certificate. Still not sure how.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got our own SSL certificate! Our bot is warm, friendly, and made from scratch, with love, and a future. There's like 5 different languages we utilized as a team to make this work! And everyone learned something new.

What we learned

AWS doesn't let students create web certificates for free, nevermind host our own domains. You can get an SSL certificate for free in a non-sketchy manner. But what does that mean about our internet today? $_REQUEST does not contain Facebook API data, you need to run some more PHP code before it's in. Dreamweaver is very nice for web development.

What's next for LookOwt

We will extend on the hospitality that our bot is capable of. We also need to make our parser work better on more than 1 single class syllabus.

Built With

Submitted to

Bitcamp 2017

Created by

I did a little bit of everything on this project. I built up the AWS servers from the ground, researching which options were best. I then transitioned to fiddling with PHP, getting our JSON callbacks in working order and helping with HTML wherever possible.

Robbie Morrison
I was in charge of writing the whole front-end website from scratch using Adobe Dreamweaver. It was my first time making a website and using javascript and jquery, let alone Dreamweaver too. Although it took forever to create, and lots of reading and tutorials, I am super proud of the way the website turned out. This experience has furthered my interest in web development and coding in general.

Kevin Beal
I was team leader in this project. Specialties I brought to the team besides general team directing were Java file parsing, PHP websocket scripting, and graphic designing.

Sam Holmberg
I wrote the entire PHP database interface, I did a lot of work on the Messenger API hooks, including a sizable amount on the conversation hook used, I prototyped the xml data files used, I wrote the script that adds xml entries to the MySQL database, I mapped some of the SQL database. I also did a huge chuck of the server configuration including apache, ssl certs (with others), remote drives on samba, etc.

feblehober123

Updates

Robbie Morrison started this project — Apr 09, 2017 02:55 AM EDT

Leave feedback in the comments!

Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.