@UnownBot, filtered

This program is designed to give you a filtered view of the @UnownBot Twitter account. It filters by distance to a set of locations (so you can be notified only about Unown that spawn near locations you can get to).

Setup

Getting the code

This program is written in Node.js, which you'll need to install on your computer. If you already have Node.js installed, make sure it is at least v8.1.4; if not, update.

Once you have Node.js installed, you'll need to open a terminal (Mac documentation, Windows documentation). Then install the program by typing

npm install -g unownbot-filtered

This will take a while as it downloads this program from the internet. Once it's done, try to run it, by typing:

unownbot-filtered

This will error, telling you that you need to set up the config file. Follow those instructions, using the below section for guidance. Once you've done all that, you can type unownbot-filtered in the console again, and this time it should work!

Configuring the program

• Copy config.sample.json to config.json.
• Add your Twitter API credentials:
  • Generate a Twitter token for your account.
  • You'll probably need to create a new application while doing so.
  • Use the generated data to fill in the appropriate fields in config.json.
• Add your Twilio API credentials:
  • Sign up for an account
  • Use the resulting page to fill in the appropriate fields in config.json.
  • Go to the SMS section and click "Get your first Twilio number", and fill that field in as well.
  • FYI, if you don't pay Twilio, it will prepend "Sent from your Twilio trial account - " to all your messages.
• Set the phone number to text in config.json's numberToText field.
• Update the locations with whatever locations and radiuses you want to monitor. Radiuses are in kilometers.
  • Unown spawns so infrequently that you probably want to cast a wide net; at least 20 km, or you may never even see a spawn.
  • Unown spawns typically last 30 minutes, so if you're driving, a 20 km detour should be achievable.

Testing

You can test the program after installing it by running

unownbot-filtered-test

which will use the test data stored in this repository's test/fixtures/tweets.json file to run through the normal program, log what's going on, and text you if appropriate. This can be used to ensure you did the setup correctly. Note that this will output some errors for tweets that are not about Unowns (e.g. the @UnownBot author soliciting donations); this is expected behavior.

Running

Once setup is complete, do

unownbot-filtered

to start the program. It will run forever, logging output for your information, and texting when appropriate.

You could leave this running on your computer, if it doesn't turn off often, or maybe you could get a cloud provider like EC2. If you're on a Linux system and want to run things in the background, you can use the command

nohup unownbot-filtered my-config.json >my-log.txt &

Running multiple instances

If you want to run multiple instances (e.g., set up one for you and another for your friends), you can use multiple config files.

To do that, copy config.sample.json to multiple files, e.g. config-alice.json and config-bob.json, and fill it out differently for each person. (You can share API credentials between configs, although you might get rate limited if you share them too much.) You will want to change the configLabel field with some identifying value (e.g. their name).

Once you have the configs set up, run the program passing each config file. For example, to run an instance for Alice, do

unownbot-filtered config-alice.json

History and credits

This project was originally known as nycpokespawn-filtered, and worked on the now-defunct @nycpokespawn Twitter account.

Later, it was forked by @benweiss into benweiss/unownbot-filtered; Ben maintained his version for several months, adding features along the way.

Starting 2017-06-10, the @UnownBot twitter account had some downtime. When it came back on 2017-07-14, the format had changed, breaking Ben's unownbot-filtered. I took the opportunity to make my own unownbot-filtered, repurposing and renaming the original nycpokespawn-filtered repository. I was certainly inspired by some of Ben's code; however most of it is from scratch.

Future possibilities

• Add walking or driving times to the messages
• Allow multiple users within a single zone, like benweiss/unownbot-filtered