Monthly Archives: February 2017

Fling a random insult at Trump after every tweet

Ok time to get political. I hate many things that Trump tweets these days and would love to reply to each tweet personally, but have neither time not desire to read his delusions. Fortunately in these modern times robots take many of our jobs. And this looked like a perfect job for a bot. Similarly to the bot described in the previous post it will be IFTTT + Scriptr combo. But this time in reverse, here’s intended flow:

  1. Twitter service at IFTTT detects when @realDonaldTrump tweets
  2. It triggers Maker service that makes HTTP request to Scriptr code
  3. Scriptr code generates random insult and posts a reply to Trump’s tweet

Here’s what IFTTT applet looks like: Continue reading →

Tweet images with Scriptr and IFTTT

Sev Trek

Looks like everybody is doing Twitter bots these days so I decided to try my hand on one as well. And it had to be something lighthearted – to let people’s mind off things for a while. Way back in early 2000s there was a funny parody comic of Star Trek called Sev Trek. Original site is gone now, but archive of images was saved at http://sevspace.com/stupidarchive/sevtrek.asp.htm. Images are numbered sequentially – ideal for automatic processing. My bot would tweet random images every couple hours.

To host bot’s script I decided to go with Scriptr which offers powerful JavaScript backend and multiple expansion modules. And IFTTT has a cool Twitter service, one that can tweet image from an URL. So the idea was:

  1. Code hosted at Scriptr generates URL pointing to an image at sevspace.com
  2. Code then call Maker service of IFTTT – custom service capable of accepting HTTP requests
  3. Maker service triggers Twitter service and passes URL of image it got from Scriptr code
  4. IFTTT Twitter service tweets the image

Continue reading →

Full control of your LimitlessLED/Milight – v6- bulbs from Amazon Echo

A while ago I blogged about controlling you Milight smart bulbs from Amazon Echo. This was done by sending raw UDP packets directly to Milight bridge. Since a packet consisted only of a few bytes – this was manageable.

Then we got v6 of Milight bulbs. They’re vastly superior to previous version – besides brightness and color you can set warmth and saturation among other things. But with new features came increase complexity of commands. UDP packets now consist of huge number of bytes and you cannot simple send packet and forget it, response matters too.

HA-Bridge, which is used to emulate Phillips Hue bulbs so Echo can detect the devices, is incapable of such commands. Thankfully it can run external scripts. Continue reading →