4. Prototype II: Sending Messages

Once we paired our devices to publish and subscribe to events from one another, we wanted to add a messaging component to our food campus map. While there are free food email chains currently out there, we have heard that by the time students read it and show up to the location, the free food is gone–causing students to feel that it was a waste of time and effort. 

Knowing that we wanted to have more instant messaging, we set up our particle with an IFTTT account and tried the SMS applet. While we successfully received a text message when we push our device's buttons, the message could only be sent to one phone number at a time during a button press. As a second attempt, we integrated the Slack applet, which could connect and send out messages from all device buttons.