Robots and sensor journalism are often discussed by digital journalists, but it's rare to see a simple, practical example.

At ONA15 we're bringing together the two with, what we hope, can be a straightforward example for journalists who are curious about the intersection of electronics, programming and reporting. With under $100 in equipment you can build a simple audio sensor that transmits to a server, then processes and stores the data, and runs a simple statistical analysis that powers a twitter "robot."

This readme covers the installation and setup of the server component. For a walkthrough of the electronics portion, including equipment and code for the Arduino, check out our wiki.

Requirements:

• Python
• PostgreSQL
• virtualenv
• Git

Create a virtualenv to store the codebase.

$ virtualenv ona15-arduino-server

Activate the virtualenv.

$ cd ona15-arduino-server
$ . bin/activate

Clone the git repository from GitHub.

$ git clone git@github.com:anthonyjpesce/ona15-arduino-server.git repo

Enter the project and install its dependencies.

$ cd repo
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

You'll need to make a Postgres database locally before you can connect your Django project to it.

$ createdb soundtracker

Make a copy of settings_dev.py and settings_private.py and configure them to connect to your new database.

$ cp project/settings_dev.template project/settings_dev.py
$ cp project/settings_private.template project/settings_private.py
$ vim project/settings_dev.py

Let Django create the database tables you need.

$ python manage.py syncdb
$ python manage.py migrate

Load in some test data, if you want.

$ python manage.py loadtestdata

Run the test server for the first time.

$ python manage.py runserver

Check out the page at localhost:8000