Otaniemi Tracker Bot
The project
On the fall semester of 2023-2024 I went abroad at Aalto University, as a Erasmus+ student I needed some place to stay during the period I was in Helsinki. However, even though me and a friend manage to get a nice apartment, we soon find out that most of the apartments rented there didn’t have any furtniture and people brought their own. Unfortunately as exchange students we couldn’t just rent a van a bring our bed, table and chair from the other side of Europe.
We quickly noticed that people there had a Telegram group in which they buy and sell their furniture and other stuff. That was the door to find a good oportunity to spend the fewer days as possible without (at least) a bed, but as day were passing most of the good deals were ‘dibsed’ very fast (even in 1-2 seconds).
That’s when I thought we needed something to increase our chances. And a bot was the solution, that’s why I decided to create a bot that was added to the buy/sell group, so you are able to set alarms for any keyword, so you can mute the main group (which has above 100 messages a day) and keep updated with the deals that get published via the bot.
After testing the bot, it was released for anyone to use some more features were needed and therefore added (such as the track as well on the giveaway group). I am happy about 200 people around campus have used it.
Bot /start command.
Bot detects your desired item.