Nerds R Us | Trace Invaders
The Challenge | Trace Invaders
Twitter Tracer
Twitter tracer is aimed at collecting crowd sourced data about local ecosystems to help maintain the habitat.
Our team comes with a varied background; not all of us were proficient in coding but we all brought something to the table in working on this project. We started the day without know what challenge we wanted to approach, but we chose the "Trace Invaders" problem suggested by NASA. We began brainstorming about ways we could have locals here crowd source data pertaining to the ecosystem within the nature preserves on Monte Sano Mountain here in Huntsville.
Once our system design was set the learning process began. We wanted to build a twitter bot in Python that could take tweets from locals as information relating to species within the ecosystem. We also wanted to develop a web application that could be accessed by interested parties and could display graphic models of the data we were collecting. Our team split up into three groups: one group determining the requirements of the modeling and how data should be represented; one person developing the twitter bot; and one person developing the web application.
The development process didn't produce a full working prototype as we were all knew to the environments we were working with. We had to learn how to use the Python language as well as how to interface through Python with Twitter. We also had little experience with web application design and had to start from the ground up there as well.
The various resources our team took advantage of in this project were: VirtualBox for virtualizing linux machines, Tweepy API for Python to interface with Twitter,Flask framework for building web applications with Python, Excel for exporting data sets found of known species lists, National Weather Service and its daily weather information.
The most frequently used resources for information were: National Weather Service, Twitter, various python and HTML/CSS forum solutions.
In all we produce a working twitter interface that can collect tweet data from specified hashtags as well as an sqlite database for storing the data. This was a great learning experience for all of us.
SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.