Sitcord

Enter/leave a Discord channel automatically when you enter/leave your chair!

A fun (and hopefully helpful) hackathon project to automate something I kept forgetting to do.

This project is obsolete and probably not good to use. Check out https://github.com/reveel-it/sitcord if you're interested in the continuation of this idea.

Required hardware

• Any Arduino-compatible microcontroller should be fine, but this project is preconfigured for an Espressif ESP32 WROOM-32D
• Any DHT temperature/humidity sensor should also be fine, but this project is preconfigured for a DHT11 sensor
• One 10K resistor
• Some wires and a small breadboard (breadboard optional but it's much easier if you have one)
• A local Wi-Fi network (My model of ESP32 doesn't support 5GHz, so make sure your network and microcontroller are compatible)

Required software

• PlatformIO extension for Visual Studio Code with the following Libraries installed (you can use PlatformIO's UI to install them):
  • DHT sensor library by Adafruit
  • Adafruit Unified Sensor by Adafruit
• If you're on macOS and intend to use an ESP32, you'll need this driver. I can't say if you'll need it or not on Windows/Linux, but that page has downloads for those OSes too.
• A reasonably recent version of Node.js
• The Discord desktop client

Environment variables

You can either set these in your environment like usual, or dotenv will load them from server/.env for you.

• DISCORD_DEBUG_PORT - Required. This is the remote debugging port that Discord is listening on. See Enabling Discord Debugging below.
• DISCORD_SERVER_NAME - Required. This is the name of the Discord server you want to connect/disconnect to.
• DISCORD_CHANNEL_NAME - Defaults to General. This is the name of the desired voice channel in the above server.
• SITCORD_PORT - Defaults to 12345 (because why not!). This is the port you would like you local Sitcord server to listen on. Your ESP32 will connect to this port to send sit/stand statuses.

Getting started

1. Make sure you've got all the required hardware and required software
2. Wire the components as described in this comment
3. Start Discord with remote debugging enabled by passing in --remote-debugging-port=<PORT> (more detailed instructions below)
4. Open a terminal, navigate to the server directory, then run npm install && npm start
5. Open this repo's as a project in PlatformIO
6. Create a new file, include/secrets.h, and write this in it, putting in your Wi-Fi info:

   • #include <Arduino.h>
     
     const String serverHost = "http://YOUR_LAN_IP:12345"; // Replace 12345 if you set a custom SITCORD_PORT
     const char* ssid = "YOUR_WIFI_SSID_HERE";
     const char* password = "YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD";
     

7. Connect your microcontroller to your laptop via USB
8. Use PlatformIO's "Upload" button to write this project's code to your microcontroller
9. All done!

Enabling Discord Debugging

You can use any available port for Discord's debug listener, but whichever one you choose, be sure to set it as DISCORD_DEBUG_PORT in your environment (or server/.env file).

macOS

If you installed Discord regularly, you should be able to launch Discord from your terminal and pass in arguments like this:

/Applications/Discord.app/Contents/MacOS/Discord --remote-debugging-port=123123

If you use the Discord PTB, the path is only slightly different:

/Applications/Discord\ PTB.app/Contents/MacOS/Discord\ PTB --remote-debugging-port=123123

Now, it isn't super convenient to launch Discord from terminal every time, especially not if you need to leave the terminal running. So, I recommend creating an Automator Application and giving it one action, Run Shell Script, with a line like this:

/Applications/Discord.app/Contents/MacOS/Discord --remote-debugging-port=123123 > /tmp/discord.log 2> /tmp/discord.err &

That will route Discord's logs and errors to files in your /tmp directory, which can be convenient, and it'll background the process so your Automator script doesn't have to leave a little spinny gear in your menu bar.

Windows/Linux

Sorry, I haven't gotten around to testing this method on other OSes yet, but since the Discord client is an Electron app pretty much everywhere, the process should be basically the same:

1. Locate the Discord binary on your computer
2. Figure out how to pass it command line arguments
3. Give it the --remote-debugging-port argument with a port of your choice

Attribution

I grabbed a lot of the DHT-reading code from the example included in Adafruit's DHT sensor library, so thanks to them for that!