chicagomapbot

Source code for a twitter bot that tweets random small-scale satellite images of Chicago every hour. Heavily sourced from and inspired by @londonmapbot created by @mattdray.

Deviations

There's one deviation from @londonmapbot that had to be implemented due to the physical geography of Chicago. When the script generates a random set of lat/lon coordinates within Chicago's bounding box, there's a good chance of it being on Lake Michigan. To avoid tweeting an image of water, I used {sf} and {geojsonsf} to load the municipal polygon boundary of Chicago (from Chicago's Open Data Portal) and check if the initial random lat/lon point intersects Chicago's municipal boundary. If the initial random point doesn't intersect, the script generates new random points until it does.

Flow

1. Github Actions (scheduled to run the scripts every hour)
2. Create random point
3. Does it intersect with Chicago's boundary? If not, generate a new point until it does.
4. Mapbox API (gets satellite imagery)
5. Twitter API via {rtweets} (posts tweet)