OrbitScope - Stardance

Ship #1

@unknown_lizzard on OrbitScope · 26 days ago

I shipped OrbitScope, my Slack bot for the Stardance Slack Bot mission.

At first it was just a basic bot with /orbitscope-ping so I could check if it was even working. After that I wanted to make it more interesting because I really like space, so I connected it to NASA APIs.

I made /orbitscope-space_pic, which sends a random space picture from NASA’s APOD API. The API was kinda annoying at first because today’s image sometimes didn’t work, so I made it choose random past dates instead.

At first the bot was only sending the image URL, which looked boring, but then I figured out that Slack has image blocks with type: image, so now the picture actually shows up in Slack.

Then I added /orbitscope-mars. I first tried the Mars rover API but it was broken/weird, so I switched to NASA’s image library and used that to get Mars images instead.

I also added /orbitscope-help so people can see the commands.

Overall it’s a small bot, but it actually feels cool to use because you can get real NASA space images directly in Slack.

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@unknown_lizzard on OrbitScope · 26 days ago

40m 18s logged

Devlog 1: Beginning of OrbitScope

Started working on OrbitScope, this is my Slack bot for the Stardance Slack Bot mission. First, I made a command to ping the bot: /orbitscope-ping(as a sanity check).

Since I love space and everything about it, I decided to make a command thats shows you a random pic from space using the APOD nasa API, the api was pretty tricky to get working at first, but after some research I managed to make it work pretty well.
command: /orbitscope-space_pic

While I was coding this I noticed that sending the url of the nasa image wasn’t showing the image in the slack workspace but I found out that I could use: “type: image” which tells the slack bot to send the url as an image.

Furthermore, I started expanding my commands, I made a similar one to the space_pic command, instead of sending a APOD pick from the nasa api I used the mars rover pictures api, so it ended up being pretty easy to code.
command: /orbitscope-mars