MakerBot

Introduction - What is MakerBot?

Makerbot is the digital assistant for Makers Academy. It was born out of a need for a user interface to pull together the resources we all use regularly. It lives inside the Makers' Slack environment. Makerbot is modular and open source so if you have any ideas you would like incorporated into Makerbot, get coding! See the section: Writing Modules for Makerbot if you would like to know how.

How to Use Makerbot

To get my attention, click on me in the Makers' Slackbot and say 'mbot' followed by a command:

help - will show you all commands. Makerbot is always updating so it's always good to check my help commands e.g. 'mbot help'
pills - will show all the Makers pills - use with an argument to get the link - e.g. 'mbot pills' followed by 'mbot pills pill.md'
challenges - will show all the Makers challenges - use with an argument to get the link - e.g. 'mbot challenges' followed by 'mbot challenges challenge.md'
talks - will show you the talks taking place - use with the following arguments: 'next', 'today' and 'tomorrow' e.g. 'mbot talks Monday'
121 - will show you the 121 schedule at Makers (remember to login!) e.g. 'mbot 121'
q - will answer your question using Wolfram Alpha e.g. "mbot q 'What's the airspeed of an unladen swallow?'"
knockknock - will return a knock-knock joke
lunch - uses the yelp API to return a list of restaurants around Makers Academy. If you give the command 'lunch random' it will return a random selection from the list of restaurants. If you give the command 'lunch +name-of-restaurant' it will return the address for that restaurant.
students - will return a list of students in the December cohort at Makers Academy. If you give the command 'student +name of student', it will return a quote from that student

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Javascript
Node.js
Mocha
Chai
Grunt
Google Calendar
Wolfram Alpha
Github

Team/Contributors

Writing Modules for Makerbot

Makerbot has a standarised way of incorporating new modules that make it easy to write new modules for Makerbot.

To create your new module, you must provide the public interface with a single #getResponse method. This method should take two arguments:

1 - Extra arguments you wish to use with Makerbot

Each module is instantiated by Makerbot with a single command, for example, the lunch module is instantiated by the command 'mbot lunch'. The initial command ('lunch'), however, is stripped away by the command parser and only the subsequent arguments are passed to Makerbot in the form of an array. If no extra arguments are passed, your module will be passed an empty array as the first argument.
For example, if you pass the command 'mbot lunch random', the lunch module will be passed the argument ['random'] and getResponse method will return a random restaurant from the list.

2 - A callback which will callback to the commandParser.

The callback method should return the response, in the form of a string, that you wish Makerbot to display to the user. It should also have an error handler (null). If you return anything other than a string, the command parser will return an error and will not display your response.

For example:

var api = require('api');
var readAPI = api();

var SuperAwesomeModule = function() {

};

SuperAwesomeModule.prototype.getResponse = function(arguments, callback) {
    if(arguments === 'moreawesome') {
        readAPI.fetch("I want some awesome things from you", function(awesomethings){
            callback(null, awesomethings);
        });
    };
};

jindai1783 / MakerBot