AnswerBot 3000

I have been kicking around various bot ideas since reading this article: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/6/10718282/internet-bots-messaging-slack-facebook-m. I was also looking for an excuse to purchase a Teensy. These 2 forces combined to create the AnswerBot 3000.

This is nothing spectacular, could just as easy be a web service too. In fact with a web service I would have more options and features. However there is something about a physical push button that makes this satisfying. Essentially you push a button and AnswerBot will randomly choose one of over 100 things to say.

Sometimes AnswerBot's response are timed perfectly, sometimes they are a little weird.

AnswerBot: reality hits you hard bro

That is an actual quote from answer bot. The inconsistency of his responses makes it funny. Especially in your IM conversations with friends and colleagues throughout the day.



So basically you just set NUMBER_OF_WORDS to the number of phrases you put in the char array. Upload it and you are done.

I surrounded AnswerBot 3000 with legos to make him look cooler. I'd like to purchase a smaller bread board so i can reduce the footprint. No soldering done here because this is a temporary project and I do not the trouble of desoldering.

So there you have it. AnswerBot 3000 version 1. Any parting words Answerbot?

AnswerBot: that is unreal

Python Web Cam Time lapse

I was tired of using this bloated Java software to do my time captures. So I did a couple searches and found out Python can do it in just a few lines of code.

First I had to install pygame. I had some trouble doing this using the standard PIP command. I ended up finding the whl here: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pygame

I downloaded the whl file and ran

pip install pygame-1.9.2a0-cp27-none-win32.whl

From there I found a quick sample script to capture image. I had multiple cameras on my laptop so I just disabled the one I didn't want. I assume you can pick a camera using pygame but "ain't nobody got time for that".

So this will loop through 1000 times snapping a picture every 5 minutes. I turned it loose and will see what happens over the weekend.