Red Pebble is a Google Assistant & Google Home bot by John Ozbay, that talks to NASA's Curiosity Rover, and tells you everything about the weather on Mars!

Red Pebble uses data from Centro de Astrobiologia (CSIC-INTA) using their amazing, kindly provided {MAAS} API, and talks to NASA's Curiosity Rover on Mars through it.

The weather & atmospheric data is being transmitted by the Curiosity Rover on Mars. Red Pebble then caches this atmospheric weather information daily using Google Cloud Functions on its own servers to make sure that our assistant doesn’t make tons of requests to the kind providers of the API listed above.

Red Pebble is built using API.AI, Google Cloud Functions and Firebase. It has two types of answers:

+ Informative interactions that doesn’t require the use of the weather API. These are questions like : “Are there any clouds on Mars?” or “Does it rain on Mars?” etc. These types of questions, that doesn’t require any up-to date weather information are handled by api.ai.

+ Interactions that require the use of the weather API. These are questions like : “What’s the temperature on Mars?” or “What’s the season on Mars?” etc. These types of questions are first received by api.ai, which in return makes a call to cloud functions server that fetches the latest info from red pebble’s cached latest.json file and finally return the answer to the user.

The Cloud Function also logs anonymous user IDs to change the way it responds to save them time and frustration. This part is handled by Firebase.

so where did the idea come from?

One day we were having breakfast with friends and thought it would be hilarious and awesome to have a home assistant that tells the weather on Mars.

I would like to take a moment to thank Centro de Astrobiologia (CSIC-INTA), operators of the {MAAS} API and everyone from the Google Home Hackathon NYC 2017 for helping and supporting us.