For those who appreciate clean air…

It seems like every year, late in the summer or early in the fall, the air in the Bay Area fills with thick smoke from raging infernos happening around northern California. The air is hazardous to breath, preventing you from taking kids to the park, walking your dog or even opening your windows.

Last year, we made the wise decision to purchase an air purifier, which admittedly, looks like a giant iPod shuffle.

As fires continue to burn around these parts, we’ve started to rely on air quality data from PurpleAir, which monitors air quality data from a series of IoT sensors that people can purchase for their homes or businesses.

You can view a map featuring realtime data collected from their sensors. Here in the Bay Area, the sensors are quite ubiquitous and can give a more realistic pictures of air quality near your home.

For example, here is the current air quality around the Bay Area from PurpleAir while I write this post.

For comparison, here is the current air quality map for Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD), which we used to reference when trying to determine local air quality.

The fidelity you get from PurpleAir is pretty amazing.

Knowing this, I decided to write a Node app that periodically queries PurpleAir for air quality data from a sensor located a few blocks from our house. It continuously runs on a Raspberry Pi setup in our entertainment center and sends me a text message to close our windows when the AQI crosses above 100.

I’ve made the source code available on Github. Check it out!

Getting started with Firebase, by building a persistent chat client

Screenshot 2015-08-07 14.05.09

I recently utilized Firebase to power the database and back end of an AngularJS web application I’ve been working on.

Firebase was proved to be amazingly easy to setup. Their “5 minute quick start” sold me on the utility of this service.

How easy is it? Let’s go ahead and create ourselves a persistent chat client in about 5 minutes. I’ll assume you’ve had some previous experience with Angular, but it’s not required.

In an empty HTML page, let’s add the Firebase Javascript library in the head section of our page.

<script src='https://cdn.firebase.com/js/client/2.2.1/firebase.js'></script>

Alright, easy enough, right?

Now, you need to create a reference to your Firebase database inside your script tag. When you sign up (for a free, even!), Firebase will give you a random URL that links to your new database.

So, a reference in your script tag, like so:

  <script>
    var myData = new Firebase('https://d______.firebaseio.com/');
  </script>

Okay, okay. Not too bad.

How do you start sending data to your new Firebase DB? You just apply some Firebase methods to the reference we created about. In this case, we’ll use the set() method.

  // Store values from our input boxes here.
  var name, text; 

  // jQuery or other magic here to set input boxes
  // to the values above.

  // Save to our Firebase DB using the .set() method.
  myDataRef.set('User ' + name + ' says ' + text);

You’d likely use jQuery to set the values of a particular input box to the name and text. You can also pass in objects to the set() method like so:

  myDataRef.set({name: name, text: text});

Another option that you can utilize to store data inside Firebase is the push() method. You can utilize this method to easily create lists of objects.

  myDataRef.push({name: name, text: text});

Okay, we talked a lot about how to send messages to our database. But how do we retrieve them? We can create an event listener using the on() method, like so:

  myDataRef.on('child_added', function(snapshot) {
    var message = snapshot.val();
    displayChatMessage(message.name, message.text);
  });

And just like that, you now have a working chat client supporting many users and can share data to all clients using it. Amazing!

nodeEbot: A bot for Twitter that generates tweets from pseudo Markov chains

Current Version: 0.1.4

Say hello to NodeEBot (pronounced as “nodey bot” or even “naughty bot”, if you prefer). It stands for Node E-books Bot.

It’s a Nodejs package for creating Twitter bots which can write their own tweets and interact with other users (by favoriting, replying, and following). This project draws heavy inspiration from the twitter_ebooks gem for Ruby.

You can see two examples of this bot in action at @daveleeeeee and @roboderp.

Installation and Usage

This project requires Nodejs v0.10.35+. If you’re looking for a place to host Nodejs projects, I’ve had success setting up a free Ubuntu virtual server through Amazon’s Web Services dashboard and installing nodejs on it.

To run, copy the project into your preferred directory and then install the required dependencies using:

npm install

You can edit various configuration settings in the bot.js file. Before you can begin you’ll need to have Twitter API credentials which can be setup right here. Once you have your consumer API key and secret as well as your access token and secret, add them to the top of the bot.js file:

// Twitter API configuration
var client = new Twitter({
  consumer_key: ‘xxxx’,
  consumer_secret: ‘xxxx’,
  access_token_key: ‘xxxx’,
  access_token_secret: ‘xxxx’
});

You’ll also need to add the Twitter username of your bot (without the @ symbol) to the config file. (This is for tracking mentions as well as making sure the bot ignores actions from itself so it doesn’t get caught in a loop).

// Your robot’s Twitter username (without the @ symbol)
// We use this to search for mentions of the robot and to prevent it from replying to itself
robotName = “xxxx”;

Once that’s done, the bot is almost ready to go. You can modify a few other settings that influence how chatty the bot is, how often it will interact with other users or use random hashtags and emojis.

In order to run the bot, I use the forever npm package. This allows us to automatically restart the server in case of a crash, as well as force restart the server in order to reload the Twitter stream (added in v 0.1.2).

Source material

The one last thing that you’ll need to do is give it some source material to generate text from. I use source material my own Twitter archive.

Right now, I haven’t implemented a way to parse the Twitter’s csv data that’s generated when you request your history. In the meantime, I’ve simply opened up the tweets.csv in a spreadsheet app, copied the contents of the ‘text’ column into a new file and used that as the source material. This script will treat each line as a separate and unique sentence.

I’ve added some basic ability to strip our Twitter usernames and URLs from the archive. That means it will treat something like:

@davely That’s great. I’ve seen something like that before. 
http://flickr.com/…

as

That’s great. I’ve seen something like that before.

Running multiple bots

If you want to run multiple bots for different Twitter accounts, copy this project into separate folders (e.g., ~/MyBot1, ~/MyBot2, ~/MyBot3, etc) and make sure you input the proper Twitter API credentials at the top of each bot.js file. Then spool up separate node instances and load up the relevant bot files.

Future things to do.

  • Better modularization of our script. Right now it’s in one ginormous .js file.
  • Turn it into a proper npm module.
  • Better regex handling to clean up source material (e.g., links, usernames, etc
  • Send direct messages back to users who DM our robot.
  • Keyword ranking of our source material. (Sort of implemented but disabled right now since performance is SLOW.)
  • Allow robot to reply with some content (e.g., if someone asks what it thinks about ‘baseball,’ it tries to compose a reply that mentions ‘baseball.’
  • Retweet various tweets that it finds interesting based on keywords and interests.
  • Let it potentially upload images or GIFs.

Changelog

v 0.1.4 (2015/05/07)

  • Simple change to load and require underscore. This is going to help simplify some of my functions in future development.

v 0.1.3 (2015/04/28)

  • Fixed bug that would cause bot to think that all users replying to it were found in our otherBots array and kept applying a temporary time out on replies, even if not needed.

v 0.1.2 (2015/04/27)

  • Implemented a hacky fix for an issue I’m having with the Twitter Streaming API randomly dying without an error. If we’re running this with the npm package forever, let’s kill the server and restart if ever few hours.

v 0.1.1 (2015/04/19)

  • Initial public release!

Other stuff

If you end up using this script in your own Twitter bots, let me know! I’d love to know how it works out for you and please let me know about any improvements or suggestions you might have.

Thanks for checking it out!

You can download the source code for nodeEbot on Github.