From the dawn of time men have famously had their own primary drive, something that they will go without food/sleep to see complete. In the way that Neil Armstrong felt the need for aviation and later space exploration, the way George Bool created a seemingly useless form of mathematics to which every device we use now owes its existence. I, it would seem, found my time best spent shamelessly trying to impress a girl.
Some backstory, I’m terrible for looking at my phone. It’s perpetually on silent, because I feel that I should be the one who dictates when it gets my attention. Because of this people are sometimes left on read.
Cue, what I have come to call the Megan Beacon
##A quick overview
I have a raspberry pi on my desk, that’s perpetually running small programs that I have written, from sensor readings to a python script to enter me in this weekly competition for a free brunch.
A Speaker, the very basic Bush Cube Wireless Speaker
She has an iphone, because of course she does.
So, this project will be a mobile app written in swift, that will send a message using dweet via the library dweepy, to be heard by my raspberry pi using Python.
##The script The script is super easy. Its just a small Python script that will compare a stored string in a text file against a string sent through dweet from the app. If there’s a discrepancy then the audio file plays and the text file is updated. Simple
import dweepy
import json
import time
import os
from gtts import gTTS
tts = gTTS('pay attention to me')
tts.save('sound.mp3')
while True:
try:
with open('need_token.txt', 'r') as myfile:
file_data = myfile.read()
dweet = dweepy.get_latest_dweet_for('MY-SECRET-DWEET-PATH')
value = str(dweet[0]["content"]["token"])
if file_data == value:
print("yep")
time.sleep(10)
else:
print("nope")
# play audio file
# write new number to token file
print(value)
os.system("afplay sound.mp3")
with open('need_token.txt', 'w') as myfile:
myfile.write(str(value))
print("updated old value " + file_data + " file with " + value)
time.sleep(10)
except:
print("there was nothing there")
time.sleep(10)
##The App I’ve never created an IOS app before so this was a huge learning curve that involved getting to grips with swift, but in the end it was actually fine, and proved to be a nice environment. The app itself is quite simple, It’s just a single button that when pressed generates a random eight character string and send it to Dweet.io via a post request. when run it also makes use of the Google Text to Speach library to create an audio file to play. This could easily be replaced by, in my case a WhatApp voice message.
import UIKit
import Alamofire
class ViewController: UIViewController {
override func viewDidLoad() {
super.viewDidLoad()
// Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.
}
@IBAction func UIButton(_ sender: UIButton) {
let parameters = [
"app": "megan",
// calling upon random string function, passing in the arguement of 8 for 8 characters
"token": randomString(length: 8)
]
let alertController = UIAlertController(title: "PRIVATE ENDEERING MESSAGE", message:
randomString(length: 8), preferredStyle: UIAlertController.Style.alert)
alertController.addAction(UIAlertAction(title: "Dismiss", style: UIAlertAction.Style.default,handler: nil))
self.present(alertController, animated: true, completion: nil)
Alamofire.request("HTTPS PATH TO SECRET DWEET URL", method: .post, parameters: parameters, encoding: JSONEncoding.default, headers: nil)
}
//function to generate a random sting
func randomString(length: Int) -> String {
let letters : NSString = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789"
let len = UInt32(letters.length)
var randomString = ""
for _ in 0 ..< length {
let rand = arc4random_uniform(len)
var nextChar = letters.character(at: Int(rand))
randomString += NSString(characters: &nextChar, length: 1) as String
}
return randomString
}
}
The I used alamofire for the post request, and installed it using cocoapods. I’ll link the repositories at a later date for any of the fellow romantics out there.
For what it’s worth, it worked. She remains my girlfriend to this day, but she did change to android. Tune in again for part 2…