Listening for gravity
I created one of my first bits of python code with help from Claude to try and understand how programs can interact with the outside world and what an api key does. Its pretty simple, it takes input from the user and posts it to my Bluesky account. It's pretty pointless but it turns out it was a good building block for another idea that spawned from Bluesky.
I was scrolling through my timeline when I stumbled across a post from Emily Hunt, sharing the first ever gravitational wave posted to the AT protocol. And it got me very excited (Im also a space nerd) So I got to thinking that the thoughts behind my ‘paperboy’ agent (he goes out searching for cool things for me to read, sifted and summarised by Claude) and my little blue sky poster could work into a new agent called Cosmic.
Cosmic sits on my pi listening for a notification from astrosky, ignoring everything else and as soon as it hears the news of a wave it posts it. It's kind of cool. Now of course I didn't code all that, I'm still an infant at python, but I discussed the ideas with Gemini and we tried a few things and after a few false starts it actually worked!
A summary of what it does from Gemini:
The Cosmic Ear: A Spacetime Observer The Cosmic-85 Observer is a specialized digital agent designed to listen to the "Firehose"—the live, high-speed data stream of the Bluesky network. Unlike standard bots that manually check for updates, this script acts as a real-time filter, ignoring billions of social posts to surgically identify automated alerts from the NASA General Coordinates Network (GCN).
When NASA detects a significant cosmic event, such as the ripples of a Gravitational Wave or a transient stellar explosion, the agent captures the signal and instantly broadcasts a formatted alert. By bridging NASA’s orbital data with decentralized social media, it turns a Raspberry Pi into a localized "Cosmic Ear," ensuring that even the most distant tremors in spacetime are noticed down here on the farm.