My daughter wants to make a tidbyt app for her 6th grade engineering project.
She is looking to have the tidbyt display that days lunch menu. LINQ Connect - Making Schools Stronger
We don’t know the first thing about coding but we are both looking forward to learning something from this project. Are there any resources or first steps someone can suggest. We are going to start digging around on here.
This is what I’d suggest:
First, get an account with Discord and go to this channel: Discord
That is where you can get help with specific issues you’ll face by asking folks who’ve made apps for the Tidbyt already. Very helpful group of folks!
I’d then get a development environment running, and I’d suggest Visual Studio Code Download Visual Studio Code - Mac, Linux, Windows
You’ll need to get yourself a github account: Join GitHub · GitHub – then go to the Tidbyt Community here: GitHub - tidbyt/community: A publishing platform for apps developed by the Tidbyt community 🚀 where you can ‘fork’ from here and create your own repository. You’ll then want to checkout your fork locally to get all those files onto your machine. This will let you get all the community apps running on your own machine.
I’d suggest getting a few apps running locally, then playing around with the code of those apps to get the hang of programming in “StarLark” a python like language.
At that point you’d be ready to create your own Tidbyt app. I think the hardest part will be getting your lunch data. You could try to scrape that screen to get the data, but that might be tough. I might ask the folks at LINQ Connect if they have an XML, JSon or RSS feed for that data. If the could provide that, it’d be much easier to program.
Alternatively, you could make a simple app that you just enter the days menu as properties of the app. Not as nice, but it would get the job done.
Hopefully that gives you some help to get started. Good luck!
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. This is exactly what I was looking for. Appreciate the help!
I see a MealViewer app was just released. Is that yours?