Berkeley Free Food

Inspiration for the project

I love free food at school club events.

Goal of project

Connects Berkeley students to free food and gives them the opportunity to discover new clubs on campus. Helps people realize that though we all have many different recreational and intellectual differences, we can all connect over the human universal constant: love for free food. Also gives publicity to clubs with free food events.

Technology behind project

The idea is that the bot has an email signed up to the mailing list of all clubs on campus, and it searches its email everyday to find all the club events of the day. It then filters out the events, storing all events that are giving out free food. Then a twitter account tweets out the events 10 minutes before the event happens, and a student can easily see which events have free food.

Challenges we faced

Trying to make Google API and Twitter API work in harmony is still a problem we are trying to solve. How to get flyers and distribute information about the events, even if we know which events have food.

Things we did well

Building a functional email scraping script. Building a image to text analyzer that can tell which events have free food and which do not.

Things we learned

We learned the difficulty of combining different working parts. Especially if those different parts in different languages or use different API's. How to set up an account through Google API; I found that it was a very useful tool for many different things and serves as a very functional hub for out project. Also allows for easy data storage.

Future of Berkeley Free Food

I hope that one day Berkeley Free Food can be a fully functioning twitter bot that can be a helpful resource to hungry Berkeley students and eventually other universities if their students want to set up their own version.