Comments on: Home automation via twitter

By: Home Auotmation

Home Auotmation — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:40:52 +0000

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!”

By: fred

fred — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:08:58 +0000

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.

By: hgh

hgh — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:43:25 +0000

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

By: Vikto

Vikto — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:26:45 +0000

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.

By: Wwhat

Wwhat — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:04:50 +0000

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.

By: twitter backgrounds

twitter backgrounds — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:06:34 +0000

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

By: novastar

novastar — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:39:21 +0000

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.

By: absolutezero

absolutezero — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:18:56 +0000

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.

By: farthead

farthead — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:48:59 +0000

Been there done that.

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

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:20:16 +0000

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.

By: clasherr

clasherr — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:56:26 +0000

Sweet – @mattsoffice how cold is it?

By: Dennis

Dennis — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:30:59 +0000

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..

By: Arduinofreak

Arduinofreak — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:22:28 +0000

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

By: amk

amk — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:47:12 +0000

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.

By: therian

therian — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:31:41 +0000

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