Why twitter? Just because you needed an asynchronous communication mechanism? And whats the practical utility apart from the cool hack?

To display a message I could use jabber protocol to hook something up with gtalk, and have the whole laptop screen flash the message. Initiated from my iphone using some gtalk client. Gets me the same without any hardware

The light sensing was good, but again, why twitter?

Posted at 2:54 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by Jeetu

i see the day forthcoming where someone sees a turd in the toilet of a webcam, and they are able to twitter and make it flush. woe is me.

Posted at 3:01 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by incognito53

jeetu,

No particular reason why I used Twitter besides the fact that I needed a reason to play with the API.

I have now added Facebook support as well.

I agree with you, there is no practical use for this. I was just tired of seeing all the devices that tweet useless information.

Posted at 3:05 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by Matt

No offense matt, the hack is great! But I was evaluating it from its practical use.

And I sometimes get sick of seeing people over-using twitter.

Good work otherwise!

Posted at 3:12 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by Jeetu

gator fan

Posted at 3:25 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by vikki

Yeah I don’t really see the point of all these “Ordinary thing VIA TWITTER!!!” articles.

Posted at 3:45 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by Tim

Twitter has the system in place to be used by various devices, and a good uptime record, so that’s why using twitter here seems appropriate to me, and it’s a nice twist on things, good job.
I think you should define a control sequence and not just use common words like light LCD though, set a standard, it’ll become a new RFC and be known as the MATT sequence maybe :)

As for a use, I think there are uses to think up aplenty surely.

Posted at 3:46 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by Wwhat

This guy has it open for anyone to set his screen or check temp and stuff like that. Pretty cool.

Posted at 3:48 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by Nathanael

… It’s called TCP, try it.

Posted at 8:07 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by ReKlipz

Its not the twitter interface that bothers me, I used to have my computer accept commands via twitter, before I figured out how to use cpanel to pipe email messages to php.

What bothers me, personally, is the use of the ioBridge. And not the fact that your paying 100 dollars for something that can only do 4 different things at a time without reconfiguring it,t though that can be expanded with PIC’s or AVR’s, its the fact that you are adding another point of failure to your system.
Anytime you make a net enabled system, you automatically have 2 points of failure, your home, if the power goes out, or your net connection dies. And however your accessing it. Your pretty much not going to get around that.
With this, instead of interfacing directly to your computer, you go through a third party.
If they were to go out of business, your SOL, if their dataserver goes down, your SOL.

Also, your letting a third party have complete access to your system. Granted, its a company, so it most likely wont be abused.

But I would much rather put together an old p2 or p3 box, load up linux, run it as a server, and issue commands and whatnot directly to it. Which is actually going to be the base unit for my home automation project once I can get another PIC programmer.

Posted at 8:32 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by novastar

what happen to simple server/client ? why people use 3rd part service for web control and overpriced io board for things any micro controller can handle

Posted at 9:31 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by therian

now we need a toilet that tweets when we poop, and a home automation system that responds to that tweet and flushes the toilet. this is necessary.

Posted at 9:47 pm on Jul 19th, 2009 by amk

Wut? This hack doesnt use an arduino. This shouldn’t happen on arduino-a-day.

Posted at 2:22 am on Jul 20th, 2009 by Arduinofreak

Not very long ago I built a small email notifier that is controlled by pyython scripts and reacts to tweets sent to a certain account(mine). It would be the easiest thing in the world to change the source code and have the device light up for example a lamp, air conditioner and/or ventilation, when being told to do so, via twitter.
Also the other way round is easy too: there’s a project called “OBDEV data logger” I think, which sends sensor values to your PC, and uses almost the same hardware/wiring schematic (an attiny45 and six resistors and two diodes, thats all).
And there you have it already – all done with attiny45, some python scripts and twitter API. No proprietary I/O interface card necessary, full automation of whatever, via twitter.

Side note, you can configure twitter accounts to be not visible to the public, anbd if you tell noone about this account you can well use it for your own automation steering purposes. You could even implement a password check when fetching tweets via twitterAPI so each tweet would need to include this authentication before it could effect something. Just my 2 cents..

Posted at 2:30 am on Jul 20th, 2009 by Dennis

Sweet – @mattsoffice how cold is it?

Posted at 4:56 am on Jul 20th, 2009 by clasherr

novastar,

I do agree that having a 3rd party server in the mix is not ideal. If something happens to them, my system is completely hosed.

But you can’t argue with ease of use, I completed the whole project in half a day.

Posted at 5:20 am on Jul 20th, 2009 by Matt

Been there done that.

I’ve been able to control my Crestron gear for a year now via tweets.

Posted at 6:48 am on Jul 20th, 2009 by farthead

If I understand the (tiny) diagram on the project site it looks like the iobridge is connected to a pc that actively monitors twitter for updates.

What about just installing apache & rss/blogging software directly on the pc instead? This would likely cut down on the lag time we see in the video.

Posted at 8:18 am on Jul 20th, 2009 by absolutezero

Matt,
You are right, The way you did it is excellent if you dont want to spend a lot of time, and have the extra cash.

And granted, if I had the extra cash, id probably buy an ioBridge to play around with too.

Me, personally, being cash strapped, cant go your rout, but putting a old computer together from the contents of my closet and making up circuit boards to control what i need it to is the only way I can go.

Posted at 9:39 am on Jul 20th, 2009 by novastar

Now that is a pretty nifty invention. Nothing wrong with a tweet after you flush :]

Posted at 9:06 pm on Jul 20th, 2009 by twitter backgrounds

Seems a bit odd to complain twitter might go down, it’s far more likely your own site goes down since twitter is of such a size and so much used by so many people (many of whom have pull) that is has plenty of redundancy, as for privacy, well you don’t have to use plain text and it’s not that sensitive to control something at home really, and as is said you can set twitter to be private.
Email is in fact less secure because countless countries store email traffic and the NSA and such monitor international email.
Incidentally about secretive twitter: people can find you on twitter by searching on email address, beware.
I do agree though that it’s nicer and more hack-like and perhaps has less lag (does twitter ever lag?) if you use more basic communication with your own setup.
And I hear there was some trouble in china and the first thing they did is close down twitter, so if you are in foreign places you might be blocked from access if you use twitter as a vehicle and can’t find a proxy.

Posted at 11:04 am on Jul 21st, 2009 by Wwhat

Yeh yeh APIs got 2 be d intresting thing on social networks cus they becoming boring. A tweet that flushes…… Cool, wud love 2 see that.

Posted at 1:26 am on Jul 24th, 2009 by Vikto

Yeah I don’t really see the point of all these “Ordinary thing VIA TWITTER!!!” articles.

Posted at 5:43 am on Jul 27th, 2009 by hgh

I think after sensing the turd the tweet should smack the guy who didn’t flush until he flushes it himself. There is no reason to automate a task as easy as flushing.

Posted at 8:08 am on Jul 29th, 2009 by fred

I use twitter as much as anyone I know, but it’s really just another protocol and frankly one that’s not so well suited for sending commands for HA. Essentially, we could take the same technology that’s been around for years, adapt it to twitter and now it gets headlines “OMG, it has teh twitters!”

Posted at 8:40 am on Aug 25th, 2009 by Home Auotmation