Alanis Rupprecht Graduate Student Spotlight

The ITS school provides its students with the resources to pursue projects that spark their individual interests. Alan Rupprecht is a first semester Masters student in the ITS program and has been working on an independent student called the Liker project. The project is essentially a series of modular LED screens in 3D printed cases that can be hooked up to a computer and made to display whatever you want. The cases were modeled in a program called Tinker Cat which Alanis said, "it's pretty basic but perfect for my application". In Alanis' case, she used API keys to access social media stats and display the number of likes, favorites, retweets, etc. that a post on social media has. API keys essentially allow information from social media sites to be accessed by the Liker. Facebook is actually the only social media that requires API keys to access the information while Twitter and Instagram allow access without. The coding required Alanis to retrieve the number of likes from a certain folder after a set interval of time. When it updates, different transitions are also programmed to play. These transitions are GIFs that are broken down into keyframes and then played back on the panels like a flipbook. The language used to run the LED panels is Bash while the transitions were coded using Python.

Alanis plans on Taking the Liker project to MakerX in Columbus on February 29th to show it off at a large scale creative expo. When asked why she pursued this project, She stated" ITS is such an abstract and immaterial concept that sometimes it's hard to get people interested in it. Concrete projects like this one show people the real-life applications of ITS and how cool it can really be."