TADHack London Winners!

Our team of five won at #TADHackLDN with a simple, yet compelling hack called Moodlight. As the name suggests the project is based on sentiment analysis. The mood intercepted on a Slack channel illuminates a LED bulb (Philips Hue smart light).

Setting up a team Slack channel was an obvious first step. Next, rather than delving directly into coding, we decided to take advantage of technologies presented at the event. Setting up a Riot chat room and bridging the conversation to Slack was a matter of minutes.

Riding the wave of plug-n-play we couldn’t wait to marry Slack with Hue via IFTTT (what else, right?!). That proved to be a dead end though.

First of all, Hue channel wouldn’t connect. After a good few attempts and thorough checks we concluded there wasn’t much we could do about it.

Also, all Slack related recipes are (at the time of this writing) uni-directional, i.e. anything to Slack works like a charm, not so much the other way round.

For the sake of time we had to resort to running a local server hooked into a Slackbot via RTM API. Big thanks to folks behind rtmbot and Algorithmia (sentiment analysis).

That’s it, in a nutshell. Happy forking!:

https://github.com/zezutom/tadhackLdn2016

Watch our pitch @29 mins and check Ryan Lintott’s post about his idea of how the hack could be put in practice. Also, there is a brief summary, photos and videos published by the organisers.