Process

Outline your approach to the project? What ideas did you generate and how did you refine or reject them? What did you research and explore? what were the design choices? What challenges were encountered and how did you resolve them?

The approach was two fold: 1) filtering news and 2) filtering stocks.

Filtering news was the easy part. Using IFTTT's New York Times applet, we selected the publication of a popular Tech article as a trigger that would activate an output pin on the particle photon. The output pin would in turn light up LEDs on the news section of the display. The light brightness  values range from 0 to 255. Every trigger raises the LEDs light values by 10 for 2 seconds, then values start falling by 5 till 0.

Filtering stock indices was the demanding part. The SP500 stock indices were scrapped from the yahoo Finance website using python. The index values were relayed to the Maker IFTTT applet as the trigger. When the stock index falls, the applet activates a pin to red LED lights. When the stock index rises, the applet activates a pin to the green LED lights. Each trigger moves the increase the LED light values by 10 for 1 second, after which it starts falling by 5 until 0.

The main challenge in the project was scrapping the index values.