Arduino/Twitter Hack – How to Make a Location-Telling Magic Clock!
by max on Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Here’s a fun Arduino/Twitter hack that involves a location-telling magic clock that you can update your location with Twitter update statuses.
The author says he will be looking in the future for automated location using GoogleMaps GPS location on smartphones. (I think that’s a great idea and perhaps be very effective in saving time if you have a super-activve kids) Also see my write-up on how to tweet your Palm Pre’s GPS location to Twitter as reference for GPS build.
- My final design uses a script to fetch four twitter feeds every couple minutes.
- The script then parses out the first words and searches for a matching ’status’.
- If no match is found, it sets the status to ‘Read Me’
- The script outputs a string with the hand number followed by a separator character, and then a letter from a-l for the status like ‘1>d2>b3>g4>a’. This would set the 1 hand to ’school’ the 2 hand to ‘Church’, the 3 hand to ‘Home’ and the 4 hand to ‘Mortal Peril’.
- The string is passed to the arduino which checks if the hand location is known. If it is and hasn’t changed, it does nothing. If it’s unknown or changed, it drives the corresponding servo to the new location and stores the current location.
Check out the video of Magic Clock in action:
Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode
(Hey, Harry, where ARE YOU???)