This project contains the web tier for the Watson Polite Candymachine. It is written in NodeJS. The transcribed voice is posted to a Node-RED flow that controls the disposal of candies. The same Node-RED flow also serves a basic dashboard that can be used to give insight in the sentiment of the audience that interacted with the candy machine.
Use the button below to start the deployment of the Watson Polite Candy Machine to your own Bluemix organization.
If you do not have a Node-RED environment in Bluemix, use the button below to deploy one to your organization. This environment will be preloaded with the candy machine flow. Once completed, choose a unique value for the MQTT topic and click on 'DEPLOY' to deploy the modified flow.
This flow can be used to test the setup by triggering both a positive and negative message. Furthermore, the requests are being published via MQTT to the local flow -- used to control the candy disposers. Finally, the requests are being logged to a Cloudant database for reporting purposes.
To complete the Bluemix part of the Watson Candy Machine's set up, set the value of the user-defined variable NODE_RED_HOST to your deployed Node-RED environment. Click 'Save' to apply the changes. Finally, restart the application so that it reads the new value of NODE_RED_HOST in memory.
You need to have NodeJS and Node-RED installed locally in order to run the candy machine's local flow. Please see http://nodejs.org/ and for http://nodered.org further instructions on how to install and configure this for your platform.
The local flow is used to send a signal to the Arduino device that triggers the candy disposers to dispose some candy. To install the local flow in your environment, copy the contents of the file resources/local_candyflow.json to your clipboard. Ensure Node-RED is started locally and open a browser that points to your local installation of Node-RED. Normally this would be the following URL:
http://localhost:1880
Next, select the menu at the top right and select 'Import' -> 'Clipboard' to paste the local flow from the clipboard to your canvas in Node-RED.
You should now see a flow similar to the flow as depicted in the image above. In that flow select the MQTT input node and point it to the topic that you defined for your flow. This name should match the topic name of the MQTT output node in your candy machine flow on IBM Bluemix.
To be able to gather statistics on the dashboarding page, some views need to be defined in the Cloudant database that is created for you when your Node-RED environment is deployed. The view definitions can be found in resources/cloudant_designdoc.json. The following commands assume you have curl installed and set up on your environment. We will invoke two Cloudant API calls. One to create the candylogs database and one to create the so-called design document. The URL for Cloudant can be found in the VCAP_SERVICES environment variable.
To create the database, open a terminal and enter the following command:
curl -X PUT <cloudant_credentials_url>/candylogs
If the database already has been created during for you during deployment you'll get a response similar to
{"error":"file_exists","reason":"The database could not be created, the file already exists."}
otherwise the response would be
{"ok":true}
and the database is created for you. You can now invoke the second API call to create the design document. Please ensure you have a local copy of the cloudant_designdoc.json file.
curl -X PUT <cloudant_credentials_url>/candylogs/_design/myDesignDoc --data-binary @<path_to_cloudant_designdoc.json>
This should return an output similar to
{"ok":true,"id":"_design/myDesignDoc","rev":"1-27af6e5ea017c0c99c939322a14a1def"}
As the event name is also an environment variable of the UI application, you can store all spoken text and sentiment per event. The Node-RED component of the candy machine makes it possible to generate a basic dashboard for the selected event. The URL for the dashboard is:
http://<your-node-red-host>/candyreport
First, select the event. Next, the dashboard is shown for the chosen event. Using web-sockets this dashboard is refreshed every minute. To enable this auto-refresh, wire the 'Trigger update' node and the 'get event' node. Click 'DEPLOY' to deploy the changes.
An example of the dashboard is shown below.
Have fun and happy coding.