Router/Twitter/Arduino Clock

ledclock

[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.

56 thoughts on “Router/Twitter/Arduino Clock

  1. 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.

  2. “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.

  3. @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.

  4. @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.

  5. 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?

  6. @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

  7. @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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. @ 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?

  11. 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

  12. ( 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 )

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. ——————————
    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.

  16. @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.

  17. @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?

  18. @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.

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