Process

The development of PoliTherm had several different steps each with its own hurdles to overcome. 

Step 1 (Proof of Concept): 

To start, JD worked on the hardware: learning how to use the Peltier Thermoelectric coolers that provided the changes in temperature, and making the hardware portable. Simultaneously, Travis worked on developing a Python script that scraped Twitter to compile tweets on a given Twitter handle (i.e. of the politician) and used an API to run a sentiment analysis on each to give a corresponding score. After both parts were developed independently, they were brought together using IFTTT's maker channel to call a function written in the Particle Dev IDE. Originally, the user could input the name of a politician and the temperature would change (hot or cold) to reflect the sentiment analysis of the particular politician. This step of the project was very taxing as it involved the most debugging of code and dealing with completely new hardware (Peltier junction) and software (Sentiment API).