Social Media HUD

[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnPfnEWFie0%5D

After [Gregg Benjamin] read our story about a simple physical email notifier, he decided to test his skills and add some touches of his own. Rather than limiting his notifier to just email, he has added support for displaying Pandora Radio songs, Facebook notifications, and email all to a LCD. He even has included code for an optional motion detector, as well as support for text message notification. We always love it when our stories inspire our readers to bring their own various solutions to similar problems, so we hope some of you take the code he has supplied (written in python for desktop side, and Arduino sketches for the microcontroller side) and add support for your own interests. Might we suggest RSS feed support, or other social media such as reddit or Google Reader? Let us know if you add something cool, and we might do a follow-up!

[Gregg] doesn’t have a blog of his own, so we have posted the demo video to YouTube, and he has provided all of his related code and images to Megaupload (warning, file is ~115 MB). Sorry to anyone looking for a blog link.

9 thoughts on “Social Media HUD

  1. I got an idea, and it cost about the same. get a motorola droid. its super portable too. :) kidding aside, there is nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel, alot of great ideas and products come from doing that.

  2. @Youtube video 0:44 – http://www.xkcd.com/668/ LOL

    While I can’t say I have much use for these notifier projects, I do have an idea to offer. Take a look at this digital photo frame @Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Pandigital-PAN7000DW-7-Inch-Digital-Picture/dp/B001T9N9JU for $67.15 USD. Also available is a WiFi enabling dongle for $19.84, which totals $86.99. The frame supports the following modes: JPEG, AVI and MP3 digital video and audio. Not sure how the Wireless works, perhaps it just shows up as an SMB share, but I’m ignoring that for now. You could run a program on your PC to watch for events. You could then render a JPEG with the information, and update the frame with your notifications. You could post basic info, or even news and weather alerts. You could even automate a daily video conversion of the daily forecast, etc.

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