twitter

150 Articles

Road Tour On A Bike With An Attitude

August 11, 2010 by 11 Comments

This is Precious. Precious is a bike that the folks over at BreakfastNY have anthropomorphised for a good cause. By adding sensors for a variety of data sources to the bike, and transmitting them back to a server via a cellular module, Precious can spit out cheeky comments about the ride on its Twitter feed. Right now Precious is on his way across the country powered by his rider, Janeen, to raise money and awareness for cancer research. You can track the progress, enjoying some attractive web design and reading the oft-beligerant comments from the bike, at yesiamprecious.com.

Although there’s no specifics about the hardware, we saw the typical project box during the teaser video. Inside you’re sure to find the usual suspects. Considering that speed, cadence, grade, temperature, humidity, and GPS data are all available on high-end bike computers we hope they found a way to just read in that data. But your guess is as good as ours; start speculating in the comments.

Top 5 Twitter Clients For Android

July 12, 2010 by 64 Comments

With the growing popularity of the Android OS for smartphones, it has become a contender for the likes of Apple’s iPhone. With the rise of Android came the facet it revolves around; Open Source. Besides it revolving around being open sourced it also has deep roots with social media. There has been an outbreak of different Twitter applications for the Android devices, each with their ups and downs suited for different types of users ranging from the socialite to the power users of twitter. These are the top 5 Twitter clients for Android (A phone running Android 2.1 OS – Éclair – will be used but most of these will be compatible with 1.5 & 1.6 OS and will be stated if they are not available to all OS versions) :

Continue reading “Top 5 Twitter Clients For Android” →

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t, Face Detection Scripts

June 27, 2010 by 19 Comments

Straight out of Ghost in the Shell, the Laughing Man makes his appearance in these security camera shots. [William Riggins] wrote us to let us know about his teams Famicam scripts. After taking a screen shot, faces are detected and counted, ‘anonymized’, and the final image is uploaded to Twitter.

The process is rather simple, and sure beats wearing a bunch of white reflective camouflage. All that’s left is detecting specific faces to make anonymous, and of course uploading the script to every camera in the world. Easy, right?

No Nonsense Mbed Development Demo

June 17, 2010 by 6 Comments

This tweeting RFID reader is a great working example for the mbed. When an RFID tag is read it is matched with the name of the owner and a Twitter message is sent out. This is very similar to the RFID cat tracker that used an Arduino.
The code is short and simple due to the use of available mbed libraries. The hardware needs just two extra modules, an RFID reader and an Ethernet socket. If you’re trying to decide if you can make the jump over to ARM development this certainly presents an easy learning curve and an opportunity to get comfortable with the code and the libraries before you make a purchase. It’s also a great set of test code to start with if you have an mbed and the two supplementary modules on hand. The quick video clip after the break will walk you through the components and the code.

Apple IIe Twitter ticker

April 24, 2010 by 18 Comments

A hand input bootloader and a custom communications protocol are what bring the Apple IIe Twitter ticker to life. [Chris Yerga] bought the decades-old machine for $20 at a flea market. Having just completed his TweetWall he decided to adapt the idea for the 1 MHz machine. He manually input a 50 byte bootloader that would let him dump programs into memory via the joystick port. From there he rigged up a connection with a USB FTDI cable. Now the images and text are processed by a modern-day machine and fed to the Apple IIe at 3600 baud. See this in action after the break.

Continue reading “Apple IIe Twitter ticker” →

Twittering Pub Hanging

April 20, 2010 by 19 Comments

There’s nothing groundbreaking about this hack, called the TweetWall, but the craftsmanship is gorgeous! [Yergacheffe] had access to the right tools; an epilog laser and a thermoplastic bender (an item we didn’t know we needed until now… thanks a lot). It has the usual bits you’d expect in a Twitter ticker, an LED matrix and an Arduino. There is also an OLED screen that displays the avatar of the current Twitter feed. Because data is transferred over a serial connection the SD slot on that screen is used to cache images which helps to keeps the messages coming without delay. The end product is quite good, we’d expect to see it hanging on the wall of the pub down the street.

Public Transportation Notifier

April 12, 2010 by 29 Comments

[Knuckles904] was tired of waiting for the bus. His town had installed GPS units on the buses so that riders could track their locations via the Internet so he knew there should be a way to avoid the wait while also never missing the bus. He developed a sketch for an Arduino to check the bus location and notify him when it was on its way.

This method saves him from leaving his computer running. It parses the text data from the public transportation website and updates both an LED display, as well as a Twitter feed. Now he can monitor several different bus lines via the hardware at home, or though a cell phone if he’s on the go.