Live Object

Quasi-library for animating Internet of Things objects based on web data

Getting Started

1. Install dependencies:

   $ pip install tweepy

   $ pip install pandas

   $ pip install pymongo

   More information about hooking up the Python wrapper for MongoDB can be found here. You may need to do additional installs if the script complains.

2. Obtain the secret.py file from another user. This file is not kept on the public repository.

3. Run $ mongod in another tab.

4. Navigate to src/ . Run python twitter_stream.py [arg_1 ... arg_n]. The script will begin scraping twitter for tweets with arg_i and save matching tweets to the running MongoDB instance. This is our data stream.

5. Go to the following piece of code in affect_model.py

self.fans = [ SmartFan(candidates[0], {{ PORT }}), SmartFan(candidates[1], {{ PORT }}) ] And change the port numbers (second argument) to match those on your computer. Thus, candidate i is represented by port i.

6. Run python affect_model.py neutral acceleration bernie hillary, or replace the candidates' names to any candidate. This should be done while the data stream is running. The program will continuously print the tweet acceleration and pipe fan strengths to the fans. Be patient at first; the accelerations will be 0.0 for the first couple of seconds.