PapibotPi, to quote or not to quote

PapibotPi was designed to made me learn both Python and MySQL, two things I did not master back in 2018. That’s for the why. Back in a time when Twitter API was free, we could create bot to post 140 character long tweet. Papibot Revillon was one of them, quoting thoughts and reflections from French chocolates called “papillotes”, only sold during Christmas time. The archived code is stored here!

Introduction

Back in 2018, I was in Clermont-Ferrand spending time at the ACoLab, the city’s FabLab, learning plenty of new stuffs as laser cutting, 3D printing or coding. One member had developed a Twitter bot to inform members or future newcomers of the opening and closing hours or news about Arduino initiation workshops.

With Christmas approaching, I convinced myself to try program such a bot with quotes we can find in French chocolates called papillotes.

Setup

The software can be found in my PapibotPi repository. Once connected to Papibot Revillon account thanks the Twitter API, it’s basically a Python program searching a single quote for an author in a MySQL database then publishing it on Twitter.

This was running on a desktop-less Raspberry Pi Zero connected to Internet and a cron task ask the program to be run three times a day.

Overview and future of the project

There may be errors in the code, the software solutions I chose may not have been the best. Was MySQL a good idea? Has the database management been well thought out ? But the first purpose of this project was to known if I was able to do so. I consider this project as a personnal state of the art, a draft to be worked on. However…

Back in Febuary 2023, with the acquisition of the social media by Elon Musk months before, some changes came. Among them, the addition of a paywall to the Twitter API.

As I write this blog post, I don’t know how this project will evolve. The GitHub repo is an archive in read-only . The Twitter account is dead and don’t tweet anymore.

PapibotRevillon is dead, long live PapibotRevillon.