Fresh hacks every day
Having been faced with an empty beer fridge one too many times the team at Metalworks came up with an approval system for dispensing malted beverages. The trick was to remove the physical controls on a can dispenser. The only way you can get a cold one is to ask the machine via its twitter account. If there's beer inside, it waits for one of your approved co-workers to give the go-ahead. There … [Read more...]
This anthropomorphized wood bowl will read Tweets out loud. It was built by [William Lindmeier] as part of his graduate work in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. View the clip after the break to see and hear a list from his Twitter feed read in rather pleasant text-to-speech voices. The electronics involved are rather convoluted. Inside the upturned bowl … [Read more...]
Tweet Receiving, that is. This Ewok model, named "Ewen the Cheerlight," is able to rotate its head left and right as well as show expressions. The most interesting feature of this hack, however, is that the little Ewok actually wakes up each time one tweets a "colour" to @cheerlights and lets it's owner [Joel] know what he thinks of the "color" you've chosen. [Joel] insists that he's like this … [Read more...]
Instructables user [matchlighter] wanted to see what he could program his Roomba to do, so he decided he would make his little cleaning machine report its status on Twitter whenever something happened. He popped open the Roomba’s case to access its serial connector, crafting a simple interface cable from some spare Cat5 he had sitting around. He added a small voltage regulator between the … [Read more...]
This bird house will tweet to let you know when the occupants pass through the door... err... hole. It uses solar panels to keep a battery topped off, and an Arduino along with an optical sensor which monitors the doorway to pass along an alert via an XBee module. Admittedly, the video after the break is a bit tongue-in-cheek and doesn't safeguard against the elements, or even against bird … [Read more...]
A fresh pot of coffee is never more than a tweet away with the Tweet-a-Pot. It works in much the same way that our Troll Sniffing Rat does. For that build we used a Python script to monitor our comments, and this does the same except that the script read tweets through the Twitter API. It watches for a specific hash tag (#driptwit) and when found it sends a serial command to an Arduino. The … [Read more...]
Being avid fanatics of flashing lights, we always love to see the peggy2 in action. The video above shows another improvement, which is two peggy2 units working together as one. [iservice2000] chained the two together and wrote new code for the display. Using an Arduino to drive it all, he has gotten them to act as one. While video on the peggy2 isn't new, this is the first time we've seen two of … [Read more...]
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