23:32 <ahh> hey guys

23:32 <dominikh> Hi.

23:33 <ahh> trying to setup a very basic cinch bot to send messages when people swipe a fob. having a hard time figuring out how to just send a simple message. I have the basic example up and running but most actions are on events and reactive

23:34 <ahh> like the on :message reply. how can i just run a method when i want and send a message ?

23:34 <dominikh> I have no idea what "swipe a fob" means :)

23:34 <ahh> like a person uses an rfid fob. tries to access the building. we wanted it to send a message in our hacklab irc room :)

23:34 <ahh> should be pretty simple but i must be missing something in the examples/docs

23:35 <dominikh> if you want to send messages without using Cinch's event system: There are Channel#send and User#send methods (technically both are just Target#send). so you could do, for example. bot.Channel("#hacklab").send("intruder") – or if you don't like the ugly casing, there's bot.channel_list.find_ensured("#hacklab"), that's the raw API

23:35 <dominikh> the examples don't really cover that use

23:36 <ahh> ah I tried the Channel but i made a method inside the Bot.new doh. let me try it

23:37 <dominikh> Cinch has both a full framework for the whole events, message matching and so on stuff, and a pretty decent normal API you can use like any other

23:37 <dominikh> and treat the Bot instance just as a connection

23:37 <dominikh> and I had no idea those things were called fobs :)

23:39 <ahh> he he thanks for the info. I just built a door unlock system for our building with magnetic locks etc.. it uses those rfid (fobs) that are assigned to people and has authentication for people. hardware/software

23:39 <ahh> the bot is kind of fun

23:40 <dominikh> sounds like one of the more interesting uses of Cinch :)

23:40 <ahh> i'm pretty new to ruby

23:41 <ahh> i got some basic event driven stuff and will probably write a small plugin at some point :)

23:41 <dominikh> :)

23:41 <ahh> it's a great plugin so far so thank you for the good work

23:41 <dominikh> you're welcome

23:41 <ahh> sigh. not able to get the Channel working

23:41 <dominikh> paste your code on a pastebin

23:43 <ahh> https://gist.github.com/prussiap/11068736

23:43 <ahh> i showed 3 ways i tried

23:44 <ahh> probably just basic ruby mistakes

23:45 <dominikh> first one can't possibly work. there's not even a variable "bot". second one can't work because a) how does the bot know where to connect and what channels to join? b) even if you provided that information, you still need to tell the bot to actually connect

23:45 <dominikh> aside from that, without a delay, even if you did it correctly, it won't work, because you'll try to send the message before it finished connecting.

23:46 <ahh> hmm ok

23:46 <dominikh> something akin to http://sprunge.us/WiGA (untested) should work

23:49 <ahh> fantastic that worked :)

23:49 <ahh> so next a method that does this for me :)

23:50 <dominikh> a suggestion: your bot should not connect, post and quit for each person that walks into the lab. it should connect once and wait for some external event

23:52 <ahh> doing like the example ?

23:52 <dominikh> the one I just showed you? yeah, that'd be how you don't want it to be, generally

23:53 <dominikh> it creates noise with the joining/leaving, and if 10 people swipe in a minute, freenode might get annoyed by the reconnects as well

23:54 <ahh> is there a way to do this with a plugin and this sample you had on your site? https://gist.github.com/prussiap/11068736

23:55 <dominikh> well, you'll want some way to communicate between whatever is registering the swipes and the bot. how you want to do that depends on a number of things

23:55 <dominikh> for example if said script is fired once per swipe or is a daemon, if it's written in Ruby or not, etc

23:56 <ahh> script is written in ruby and will be running locally. it makes a curl call to rails app to ask for permissions

23:56 <ahh> but I could just to make my life easy run cinch in the rfid ruby script to start

23:56 <ahh> all in one file :)

23:57 <dominikh> if that script is a long-lived process, then yes

23:57 <ahh> it will be running yes

23:57 <ahh> basically a while loop with some interrupts

23:57 <ahh> all running on a raspberry pi