Recently I bought Anki Cozmo. This little tiny robot is amazing and a great companion on your desk. Cozmo comes with a great personality. He is full of fun, he plays games with you, do tricks, animate and makes a lot of joy. Cozmo comes with a Camera that can detect faces and greet people and pets. It also has a SDK which allows you to customize Cozmo and create cool Apps and IoT connected programs.

In this post, I’ll show how to use Cozmo with my Jenkins IFTTT Build Notification plugin to send build notification to Cozmo. He will animate to these notifications and do some tricks like lighting up his cubes. This will make Cozmo an eXtreme Feedback Device

The Cozmo SDK comes with a bundle of examples and apps that you can play and modify. There is a bunch of examples that connect Cozmo to IFTTT and use different channels like Gmail or Sports news. I took the Gmail example and modified it to get Jenkins notifications. Here’s how this works on a high level:

Step 1 – Connecting Cozmo from IFTTT

In order to connect Cozmo from IFTTT, we need a computer running Cozmo exposed to the internet. You can do this either by using a static IP or using a tool like ngrok which sets up a secure tunnel to localhost running on your computer. To set up ngrok follow instructions from https://ngrok.com/download

Run this command to create a secure public URL for port 8080:

 ./ngrok http 8080 

Note the HTTP forwarding address shown in the terminal (e.g., http://4916890d.ngrok.io). This is required while creating the IFTTT applet.

WARNING: Using ngrok exposes your local web server to the internet. See the ngrok   documentation for more information: https://ngrok.com/docs

Step 2 – IFTTT Jenkins Cozmo Script

Cozmo SDK is presently available in Python. The IFTTT examples use aiohttp module to create a web server with an endpoint with a handler to call the Cozmo SDK:

Complete source code is available at https://github.com/upgundecha/cozmo-python-sdk

Step 3 – Creating IFTTT Recipe

IFTTT is a web service that lets you create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. An applet is triggered by changes that occur within other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. An applet may send an e-mail message if the user tweets using a hashtag or copy a photo on Facebook to a user’s archive if someone tags a user in a photo or it can trigger an support IoT device to a specific action.

In this example, we will create custom IFTTT Trigger and Action using Maker Webhooks feature.

1. Sign up and sign into https://ifttt.com
   1. Create an applet: https://ifttt.com/create
   2. Set up your trigger.
      1.         Click “this”.
      2.         Select “Maker Webhooks” as your service.
      3.         Under “Choose a Trigger”, select “Receive a Web request”.
      4.         In “Receive a Web Request”, enter “JenkinsBuild” as “Event Name”
      5.         Click “Create Trigger” button
   3.     Set up your action.
      1.        Click “that”.
      2.        Select “Maker Webhooks” to set it as your action channel. Connect to the Maker channel if prompted.
      3.        Click “Make a web request” and fill out the fields as follows. Remember your publicly accessible URL from above (e.g., http://55e57164.ngrok.io) and use it in the URL field, followed by “/iftttJenkins” as shown below:

URL: http: // 55e57164.ngrok.io / iftttJenkins
Method: POST
Content Type: application / json
Body: {“project”: “{{Value1}}”, “build”: “{{Value2}}”, “status”: “{{Value3}}”

Click “Create Action” then “Finish”.

Here is video loop for above settings:

Step 4 – Configuring Jenkins Build Job

Setup Jenkins Job – requires IFTTT Build Notification Plugin

In Jenkins job “Post-build Action” section add a new “IFTTT Build Notifier” action with following values:

1. Event Name: JenkinsBuild
2. Key: <Make Webhooks Key>

Note: You can get your unique Maker Webhooks Key from https://ifttt.com/services/maker_webhooks/setting

Finally, run the Jenkins job to test the setup. In response to the ifttt web request, Cozmo should roll off the charger, raise and lower his lift, announce the status, and then animate and light-up the cubes.

Here is video loop for above settings:

Running it together

Here’s video with Cozmo’s reaction to a passed build vs. a failed build: