If you ever wanted your name out on the Internet, now is your time to shine. [Chris] hooked up an Arduino to the Internet and is streaming the results of combing through Twitter live to the entire world.
The SocialBot9000, as [Chris] calls his build, is an Arduino Uno connected to an Ethernet shield and an LCD character display. The firmware uses the Twitter API to search for recent posts containing the phrase, ‘socialbot9000.’ A PHP script on the Arduino does all the heavy lifting and with the great Bildr tutorial on getting the Ethernet shield up and running, [Chris] was off to the races.
Because it’s extremely doubtful that everyone on the Internet could manage typing a message into Twitter that would be correctly parsed by the SocialBot9000, [Chris] put a small form up on the build log that will correctly generate the message and take you to your Twitter account for posting. After all that was done, [Chris] decided to have some fun and set up a live feed from a camera in front of the LCD display for the world to watch.
The next step is to make it do something fun! We hooked ours up to a relay that flashes a red light any time a tweet mentions @officenomads. Its amazing how much joy this brings around the office.
Here’s a video of our Twitter Box!
http://vimeo.com/28775301
“A PHP script on the Arduino does all the heavy lifting” WAT?
Yeah, I find that hard to believe.
As I expected, reading the article reveals that the php script is hosted elsewhere and parses the data into a format desired by the sketch running on the arduino.
You beat me to it. The PHP is not on the arduino.
Yes, of course PHP is not running on the Arduino. The real question is, why didn’t the editor realise that?
Nothing like a good stress test. And Socialbot9000 gets a fail. Looks like it needs another restart.
Need to figure out why it keeps locking up…
Tried your tweet but didnt see it on live feed :(
@Gagan see my comment above. It has been locking up for some reason. I just restarted it so try again.
Similar project here http://trandi.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/vfd-clock-connects-to-the-internet/ but using wireless and a “fancier” display :)
dan
Huh… I forgot to submit it but I built almost this exact device a while ago, with a potentiometer to control the speed at which the message scrolls, and a tiny flag powered by a servo which notifies you of new tweets. Videos, pseudocode and flowcharts to be found in the Instructable here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-LCD-Twitter-display/
noway! another silly device that puts twitter on a display of some sort. How many of these are we up to now? at least ones that use that adrunio bullshit anyway?
Cool stuff, I’ll be back!