Display Twitter on an Arduino

February 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you ever wanted your name out on the Internet, now is your time to shine. [Chris] hooked up an Arduino to the Internet and is streaming the results of combing through Twitter live to the entire world.

The SocialBot9000, as [Chris] calls his build, is an Arduino Uno connected to an Ethernet shield and an LCD character display. The firmware uses the Twitter API to search for recent posts containing the phrase, ‘socialbot9000.’ A PHP script on the Arduino does all the heavy lifting and with the great Bildr tutorial on getting the Ethernet shield up and running, [Chris] was off to the races.

Because it’s extremely doubtful that everyone on the Internet could manage typing a message into Twitter that would be correctly parsed by the SocialBot9000, [Chris] put a small form up on the build log that will correctly generate the message and take you to your Twitter account for posting. After all that was done, [Chris] decided to have some fun and set up a live feed from a camera in front of the LCD display for the world to watch.

Filed Under: arduino hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Hackaday Links: February 26, 2012

February 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Wii Nunchuk controlled Monotron

Adding a bit of motion control to your music synthesizer turns out to be pretty easy. Here’s an example of a Wii Nunchuk used to control a Monotron. [Thanks John]

Hackers on the Moon and other space related goals

Yep apparently a non-government backed expedition to the moon is in the works. But you’ve got to walk before you can crawl and one of the first parts of the process is to launch a hackerspace-backed satellite network called the Hackerspace Global Grid. Check out this interview with one of the initiative’s founders [Hadez]. [Thanks MS3FGX]

Laser pointers and frosted glass

We were under the impression that a laser show required finely calibrated hardware. But [Jas Strong] proves us wrong by making pretty colors with laser pointers and slowly rotating glass. [Thanks Mike]

MSP430 Twitter Ticker

[Matt] built a Twitter ticker using the TI Launchpad. It works on an LED matrix or OLED display along with a Python script which handles the API.

Android floppy drive hack

[Pedro] shows us how he reads floppy disks with his Android tablet. The hardware includes a docking station to add a USB port to the tablet, as well as a hub and USB floppy drive. On the software side of things an Android port of DOSbox does the rest.

Filed Under: Hackaday links Tagged With: , , , ,

Tweets send your balls flying (on TV)

February 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Members from the London Hackerspace recently got a little on-air time with a ping pong ball launcher. They were invited to build something for the Click show on BBC. The launcher that they built responds to hash tags on Twitter by barraging the audience with balls.

The hardware was built in two parts. The first is a dispenser that responds to incoming Tweets by releasing one ball onto a set of staging ramps. The other portion is the launcher itself. Building it like this makes it a rapid fire device, as the spinning wheels of the launcher make quick work of several dozen balls just waiting to be let loose. Check out some footage from the show after the jump.

We like this one just as much as that remote controlled launcher. We’re glad to have seen these both because we happen to have a surplus of the balls lying around since we built that clock and we’re not about to undertake some of the more dangerous ping pong based projects we’ve seen. [Read more…]

Filed Under: misc hacks Tagged With: , , ,