Twittering Toilet

We wouldn’t want to let a week slip by without something new being made to twitter would we?  This time it is a toilet. Don’t worry, they are sparing us the graphic details, it pretty much tweets every time it is flushed. As you can see in the picture above, they’re using an Arduino for the toilet/PC connection. If you really want to make something twitter, this might be a good starting point. It’s basically twittering every time a button is pushed. You can download the source code on the site as well as find a tutorial on Arduino basics.

[via astera]

38 thoughts on “Twittering Toilet

  1. Well seeing as how half my “friends” twitter every time they fart or use the bathroom, this seems pretty fitting. I will probably make a ton of money building these for them. glad I don’t use twitter.

  2. the twitterings toilet does sum up twitter pretty well. twitter is just a fad it will pass, its like the saying “all that and a bag of chips”, in a year or so everyone will realize how dorky it was.

  3. Ok, so it could be useful to keep tabs on how much water you’re wasting. I am, surprisingly, not doubting the usefulness of the combination. Just the usefulness of using an arduino.

    If it’s hooked up to a PC anyway, why not just have the whole program on the pc, watching for the button-push on a, for example, serial port?

  4. Wait a tick. You can customize the message it sends out. This is Virtual Grafiti.

    So now instead of scribbling on the bathroom wall and you make a witty 140 char posting and submit it with a flush. Ingenious.

    See you gotta read the article.

  5. Honestly, who on earth would ever want somebody to know what they’re doing every second of the day, including every second spent in the bathroom?

    The big question is: who wants to know what you do in the bathroom?

    Like a joke that has been taken to far, twitter’s gotta stop.

  6. A better experiment would be to electronically control the flush from a client watching for the toilet twitter to show up on the user’s twitter page.

    then users would always get a first-hand, very tangible picture of what the current internet lag was like to the location…

  7. Add RFID to identify the person.
    Add a pressure sensor to check if they sat down.
    Add the gas sensor and find out if they did #1 or #2.
    If it’s #2, you could have a web cam trigger after the person gets up and takes a picture and sends it to ratemypoo.com

    How would you detect if they just flushed something down the toilet?

    How about that toilet that could diagnose things?
    Hell, lets get a toilet that breaks everything down to figure out everything you ate, drank, smoked, etc..

  8. I will not go into another one of my signature rants about how much twitter blows, because I’m sure you’ve all heard it by now. But seriously. Every time something like this gets posted — which sadly happens almost every week, if not more — I loose a little more of my sliver of remaining hope for the fate of humanity. All I can say is that I really, really hope this pitiful fad ends very soon. For the sake of everyone.

  9. …does anybody remember 1996 (or earlier?) One of the first live webcams installed in a stall of the ladies bathroom on floor x of the Empire State Building… and how many ladies do you think worked in that IT company? I don’t think I saw anyone except the cleaning lady…

    Aren’t most technological experiments of dubiously useful nature?

  10. they should twitter or tweet when someone doesnt wash their hands… people get quite cozy at the office… rucky “Try the duck, it is most succulent!”

  11. So… does it record a log-file, and if something goes wrong does it dump core?

    Yes, those are crap jokes and I have nothing of use to add really. Just like most Twitter entries :)

    I am actually curious why they have ethernet in their bathroom though.

  12. OK if i were to expand on this it would have to twitter as follows

    Captains Log:
    (Date)
    (Time)
    (Name)
    (Number[1/2])
    (Duration)
    (Flushed?)
    (Washed?)

    we could have a weekly competion to see how much time each of us spent on the crapper

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