thingybot

A modular, command driven Twitter bot, currently only generating visualizations of L-Systems, though easily adaptable for more interesting purposes.

• Configurable poll time (not using streaming api (yet))
• Can send media tweets (w/ image attachments)
• Keeps track of last processed tweet ID (to avoid duplicates)
• Adds proper source tweet ID for replies

@thingybot

Usage

Overall tweet syntax is:

@botname command,command-specific-arguments

L-System generation

Example tweet to generate an L-System visualization (note: the bot is not running 24/7 at the moment):

@thingybot lsys,#fff,16,60,90:s=a,a=a+b+,b=-a-b

The overall format for the lsys command is: header:rules, where header is a comma separated list of:

• CSS hex color string
• Number of iterations
• Start angle
• Rotation angle

Rule syntax

A ruleset is a comma separated list of single letter rule IDs an their replacements. The ruleset must contain a rule named s - the start rule (axiom, also see above example).

E.g. s=f-f-f-fs defines a rule named s which is iteratively expanded into:

1. f-f-f-fs
2. f-f-f-ff-f-f-fs
3. f-f-f-ff-f-f-ff-f-f-fs etc.

Other rule symbols are:

• f - forward (draw line)
• - - rotate left
• + - rotate right
• [ - store state (e.g. for branching)
• ] - pop state (end branch)

Run-length encoding can be used for multiple consecutive symbols (to save precious char counts), e.g. 5+ expands to +++++. Only the single-digit numbers 2 - 9 can be used for this purpose.

Furthermore, the symbols a - e can be used as markers or for more complex, mutually recursive replacements and each also execute an implicit forward motion. The symbols x,y,z are similar too, but do not incl. a forward motion.

Error handling

For security reasons the bot will refuse to execute systems expanding to more than 1 million symbols.

If there're any syntax errors, you'll most likely get a text-only reply telling you so, or if the error is more subtle, receive an image based on default values for the ones which were unspecified or contained errors (e.g. header settings, missing rules).

Running

First edit launch-sample.sh and add your Twitter API details (see below). Save file as launch.sh, then launch via:

./launch.sh repl

In the REPL kick off with:

;; start bot w/ 60s poll interval
;; (shorter periods will trigger Twitter's API rate limit)
(def bot (run state 60000))

;; `bot` is a control channel, which should be closed to stop the bot
(close! bot)

Create Twitter app credentials

1. Go to: https://apps.twitter.com/
2. Create new app (don't need callback URL)
3. Copy Consumer key/secret & Access token/secret into launch-sample.sh
4. Change the bot user name

License

Copyright © 2015 Karsten Schmidt

Distributed under the Apache Software License 2.0.