nopeusbotti

A Twitter bot that plots the velocities of HSL buses. The data is from HSL Vehicle Positions API (© Helsinki Region Transport, 2022). NOTE: Starting from 3.4.2023 the APIs will require registration and API keys (https://digitransit.fi/en/developers/api-registration/), which is not supported by this project. The terms of use have also been updated. Please review the changes at https://digitransit.fi/en/developers/apis/6-terms-of-use/.

Installation

This project uses Poetry for dependency management. Please refer to their documentation on how to install it: https://python-poetry.org/docs/#installation. The required Python version is >= 3.8.

After installing Poetry, simply run

poetry install

to install all the dependencies in a virtualenv.

Running

Running the Bot

After installing the dependencies, the bot can be run with

poetry run nopeusbotti --help

Unless --no-tweets is set, the following Twitter API credentials must be provided as environment variables:

• ACCESS_TOKEN
• ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET
• API_KEY
• API_KEY_SECRET

The "Essential" access category is sufficient to run the bot: API v1.1 is used for posting the images, and v2 for the actual tweets. See https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/petition/essential/basic-info for more information.

The bot tracks buses within an area defined by maximum and minimum lat/long values. The buses are defined with the route numbers, e.g. 570.

The following command

poetry run nopeusbotti \
  --speed-limit 30 \
  --north 60.297449 --south 60.2958756 --east 25.059465 --west 25.0569888 \
  --route 570 --route 711 --route 717 --route 717K

runs the bot as seen on https://twitter.com/30bussit:

• the monitored routes are 570, 711, 717 and 717K
• the speed limit is 30
• the speed limit is monitored within the depicted area:

Producing Weekly Statistics

The repository also contains a script that produces weekly statistics that can e.g. be configured to run as a cron job every Monday. It can be run with:

poetry run nopeusbotti-statistics --help

NOTE: In order to produce the weekly statistics, the bot must be run with --write-csv, and the --csv-directory must be specified to the same path for both commands.