[Kyle] decided to build the above LED clock for his church. Though it may look impressive enough, it is also hiding loads of features. [Kyle] wanted to make the clock as easy to control as possible, so rather than use buttons or dials to control what is being displayed, he used Twitter. The clock is connected to the internet through a Linksys WRT54GL. The router was hacked so not only does it supply the connection to Twitter, it also parses all of the replies the clock’s feed gets. The clock responds to commands to turn it on or off, run a countdown before service, display the number of viewers on the church’s live stream, and display a sequence of numbers. The time never needs to be set, as it is synched from the internet. The circuit for actually driving the display is based off a PIC, but it was changed to run off an Arduino.
it should tweet the pastor when his sermon starts going over, man my pastor could really use that…
Does it count down to the second coming of christ?
Or would that cause a runtime error, possibly an infinite loop since the condition can’t be met.
Little anti-theist humor there.
Cool none the less, well done.
none will know the time…
but all will know what is the time…
Does anybody really know what time it is?
Does anybody really care?
Would be funny to program this to run progressively more slowly over the course of a service.
arduino ftmfw
More unnecessary use of twitter…
it uses twitter for the sake of using it.
with what he has there is ZERO need to use twitter.
Religion sucks ass, more hacks.. less ass.
SWEET twitter AND an arduino :) does it get much better then that.
“as easy to control as possible”
Translated into needing an entire computer, an internet connection, a web browser and two twitter accounts, instead of … “buttons or dials”
Human Interface Design Fail.
@monkeyslayer56
the phrase is “doesn’t get much better than that”. and yes it does. not everyone is hung up on the twitter and arduino craze. to most of us, this is pretty pointless. just because it uses a popular web “service” and a popular microprocessor does not automatically make it an awesome processor.
@monkeyslayer56
the phrase is “doesn’t get much better than that”. and yes it does. not everyone is hung up on the twitter and arduino craze. to most of us, this is pretty pointless. just because it uses a popular web “service” and a popular microprocessor does not automatically make it an awesome project.
Good thing they avoided those complicated buttons, nothing like trendy Web 2.0 services to streamline your usability.
@Klaymen: i’m pretty sure it was a joke.
@Klaymen
it was more of a joke then anything and i said “DOES it get much better then that” not “it doesn’t get much better then that”
so it uses twitter AND arduino AND convulted logic. It’s like it was designed to spite the readers and complainers here
In the interest of making it easy to control, he’s made a Rube Goldberg clock/timer/counter….
I like it
Hackius: “so it uses twitter AND arduino AND convulted logic”
Jacob Woj: “[Kyle] decided to build the above LED clock for his church.”
good fit
0mf6 +h1Z 1Z +h3 fUck1n6 4++4ck 0f +h3 l33+ h4x0R
4RdU1n0 5+Yl3 m33+Z +w1++3R..
It’s weird how there are “techy” people, who should be fairly rational, believe in fairy tales.
Anyhow.. that’s a lot of hardware/pointless stuff to implement this. I would have been more impressed if he used twitter but drove the display from the WRT’s GPIO. Otherwise the WRT is just a waste.. why not one of the ethernet shields off of ebay? or just some buttons instead of twitter?
@jan It worries me that I can understand that.
@rofl
ROFL
why do all these anti-religion nuts always feel compelled to trash-talk religion? the article didn’t push any views. it simply used the word “church”. how horribly intolerant…
@samuri
Yeah because the church has NEVER been intolerant of outside views. The crusades were probably more like a pillow fight than the bloody masacre history makes them out to be.
Logic ftw
>anti-religion nuts
People that believe in sky fairies, stoning people to death, covering up sexual abuse etc etc shouldn’t really go about saying others are nuts IMHO.
If it’s connected to the internet, why receive the time settings from twitter? Why not just get them from an Internet Time Server such as http://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi ?
Mike
This project, posted on HaD, linked to my project as part of the background info. That’s gotta be worth some nerd points.
@cantido:
So what exactly do you believe then?
@monkeyslayer56 – I imagine the complaint about language was the use of “then” instead of “than”. “Then” is a relative point in time, while “than” is used for comparison. Since you used the same word not only in the original post but also in the follow-up, it indicates a lack of awareness of which word should be used rather than a simple typo. In addition, the structure of your OP is a query, so should have been terminated with a question mark rather than a period. I’m not the grammar police, but the increasing confusion between “then” and “than” is annoying.
will all of you guys shut up and stay on topic?
p.s. JESUS FTW
antitheist ftw.
god said let them have no buttons, then god said “lol ok, maybe they can use twitter and a keyboard full of buttons” and he thusly lol’d(and caused a thunderstorm). thus god made the story of “the large church LED clock” longer than it ever needed to be… and had it added to the new testament… and also in microbible print… and also onto the shell of a tortoise, which he taunted Buddha with.
I don’t see what all the hate about twitter is. What I see is someone who used a technology to expand it’s original function. Maybe he wanted the commands user readable.
Not only do you have a simple, prebuilt, no real need to maintain way to communicate two parallel functions; he also creates a readable log (maybe someone else wants the notifications).
There are other (more efficent) ways to do this, so give suggestions. I don’t use an adrino in production but I have a twitter account for my apps to do SMS for me. When ever it breaks I don’t have to worry about it, twitter’s tech crew is working on it.
@ Raged, Twitter is a useless pile of shit and so is Plurk and all of the other ‘social’ websites.
Other than the fact that this is way too much effort for something so simple I guess you can bank another cha-ching on your Arduino advert points yes? It Twitter kicking in now too?
It scary that such people might become engineers and make new products…. For something simple as this make it into full web server.. when all it need cheapest uC and IR for remote control
( insert anti religious comment here)
can we get back on topic about the hack ?
its a VERY cool hack, sure somewhat un-necessary and over engineered but, thats what hacks are sometimes about !
( insert statement about what religion/s i do/dont belong to )
@tim
sry for missuing the word i guess i wasn’t in “school mode” and as for the fowlow up same resaon and the ctrl+c ctrl+p :)
btw again i must say cool hack
“somewhat un-necessary and over engineered”
i’m totally unsure what you mean by “somewhat”
Twitter may seem like overkill, but it is cleverly implemented for remote control. The clock could have had its own server set up for receiving commands, or use a service (in an unconventionally way) that runs on much more secure and reliable servers (Twitter). The fact that it was built for a church does not relate to the quality of the hack (in any technical sense) rendering a good portion of the comments irrelevant.
Flying spaghetti monster FTW!!!
Bow to my noodly appendages.
Please please please keep religious vomit out of my hackaday at all costs.
Twitter isn’t entirely useless. Surprisingly, there have been two good uses its been put to;
First, rioters have used it to keep ahead of police movements in real-time. Definite win.
Secondly, us old farts have discovered a message with embedded link with a tag that is really heavily searched at that moment will get literally tens of thousands of young’uns that don’t get the reference to Goatse themselves over their smartphones simultaneously, like a herd of lemmings.
That’s gotta be worth something. Not much, but something.
@everyone knocking on god: you gonna burn
@every one knocking on twitter: you gonna burn twice
http://twitter.com/god
——————————
cantido said:
It’s weird how there are “techy” people, who should be fairly rational, believe in fairy tales.
——————————-
You’re right. How could any *rational* person believe that one day, for *no* reason at all, a pin-dot appeared, exploded, and then became an entire universe. Not only that, but randomly, pi, planck’s constant, gravitation constants, the values for strong and weak nuclear forces, e, the speed of light, and a hundred other critical universal parameters just happened to be right to allow for the formation of stars and fusion processes to form heavier elements. Then, magically, a planet was formed at the perfect distance from the correct-sized and aged sun, surrounded by a moon that was just right to stabilize the spin of that planet and induce tides. Then, molecules randomly assembled themselves to form living structures that scientists, after a 100 years of study, still cannot reproduce. Lets not forget that these primitive structures then developed, on the basis of natural selection and mutation, into beings capable of pondering god and their own creation (a talent, by the way, that has no “evolutionary” benefit, and should not have developed via “evolution.”
I expect scientists to be brutally honest about objective data. The idea that all of this happened by chance is absurd. The *data* shows evidence of refined design. As an engineer, I can recognize the difference between random events and design. Can you?
You are correct that there are *large* numbers of otherwise rational people who are buying into utter bullshit, but it’s not the people you think.
@darwin
“randomly, pi, planck’s constant, gravitation constants, the values for strong and weak nuclear forces, e, the speed of light, and a hundred other critical universal parameters just happened to be right to allow for the formation of stars and fusion processes to form heavier elements.”
These forces and constants were only “right” because we are alive to observe them. See this page for more details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
“Then, magically, a planet was formed at the perfect distance from the correct-sized and aged sun, surrounded by a moon that was just right to stabilize the spin of that planet and induce tides.”
Not magically, but scientifically. There are clearly defined laws and guidelines which define how and when planets can form. Also, as far as the earth, moon, and sun being correctly positions, please refer to the page on the anthropic principle.
“Then, molecules randomly assembled themselves to form living structures that scientists, after a 100 years of study, still cannot reproduce.”
This is absurd. What molecules can’t scientists reproduce? Name one.
“Lets not forget that these primitive structures then developed, on the basis of natural selection and mutation, into beings capable of pondering god and their own creation (a talent, by the way, that has no “evolutionary” benefit, and should not have developed via “evolution.””
Not everything has to have an “evolutionary” benefit. Evolved traits only come into play in a critical way when they they determine the lifespan/number of offspring or the creature in question. Maybe the ability to ponder “god” is actually an evolutionary DETRIMENT, since when too many humans ponder “god” differently they end up mass-murdering each other over conflicting beliefs.
“The *data* shows evidence of refined design.”
Prove it.
“You are correct that there are *large* numbers of otherwise rational people who are buying into utter bullshit, but it’s not the people you think.”
Die in a fire.
“As an engineer, I can recognize the difference between random events and design.”
If, as an engineer, you believe in “intelligent design” (creationism), that’s your decision. However, thanks for advertising the fact that you’re unfit to be a scientist. You might be able to design some widget, but a scientist you are not.
@darwin
I’ve always put it this way to religous fanatics – Sure god (or whatever surpreme being(s) you believe in) may have created us, evolution is HOW we were created.
@Zymastorik
So how would you have done it? Would you have it read a database or a dynamic web page for updates? What is your more simplistic time? and how much R&D time does it take to design the simplest way?
@octel
scientist != !religious
religious != !scientist
@samurai:
I never claimed a blanket statement about religion and science. Many intelligent people can integrate both, but keep them in their separate realms.
I was specifically saying that “darwin” was not thinking scientifically because of his blatantly erroneous claims and conclusions.
@octel
that’s cool. as long as you just leave me be to design comm equipment AND go to church.