Let The Right One Tweet
I got one of these lovely Aruinos last week. They’re a great hardware platform that makes it easy to build physical stuff in the same way frameworks make it easy to build web apps.
After completing a tutorial showing me how to make an arduino blinking LED, the hardware world equivalant of Hello World, I thought “Wow, this is cool. I wonder how far I can push this blinking LED technology. Perhaps I can use it to communicate using some secret long/short pulse coding. A retro-twitter”. Alas it appears someone beat me to this idea and created a protocol called “Morse Code” which seems a common standard but I can’t find an RFC for it.
Which leads me to my first Arduino Project: Twitter Morse Code. It takes tweets, and shows them as morse code instead. It’s very simple and has two parts
Listens on the serial cable and converts any ascii strings it receives into morse code on an LED.
Checks Twitter Search for any new tweets including the #morse hashtag, pushing any new tweets down the serial cable as a string.
In this set up the arduino is a ‘dumb’ output peripheral that does only what the computer it is teathered to says. It would be interesting to give the arduino an ethernet controller to allow it to talk directly to twitter without being tied to a PC.
