Teletype Twitter Frontend

April 7, 2010 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

The folks from NYC Resistor got their hands on a teletype machine and hacked it to monitor Twitter. This eighty-year-old beast bangs out messages that it receives at 45.45 baud. This isn’t a project that turns something into a teletype, but rather finds a different way to feed the machine data. In this case, a python script parses Twitter and sends the data it finds to an Arduino board. The Arduino in turn formats the message into the serial format necessary to communicate with the device. To the left you can see a trend plotter, learn more about both in the video after the break.

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Teletype Machine From An Electric Typewriter

February 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

This project, by an unknown hacker, patches into an electric typewriter and uses it as a Teletype. An AVR ATmega168 microcontroller patches into the key matrix of the typewriter which allows it to artificially type. Now, data can be sent over a serial connection to the AVR for output on the typewriter.

We’re not quite sure what this is going to be used for. We’ve seen hacks like this for Twitter reading in the past but he makes no mention of that type of use. Personally, we’d like to have this just to “print” out the occasional letter. Typewriters are so rarely used these days it would be a bit peculiar to get a letter that has the dimpled impressions associated with slamming a die into a piece of paper.