The love for Twitter around the .:oomlout:. office is undeniable. We check it constantly, and as those of you who follow us know post to it far too often (or if you don’t follow us we’re @oomlout :) ).
We thought it appropriate to allow Twitter to be more than just an on monitor phenomena. To accomplish this we have combined an Arduino, Ethernet Shield and typewriter. We added a little bit of solder (we’re spoofing keystrokes) and some coding (available here) and what we have is a twitter monitoring machine.
It search’s for a term every 10 seconds (in our case ‘oomlout’ although ‘#haiku’ is good fun too). When a new tweet is posted it will proceed to whir to life and type it out (at the same time making us feel like we’re back in the 1970s).
(We hope to find time in the near future to properly document this as it was good fun, so stay tuned)
(A small video of it typing out a discovered #haiku)
(a small video of the tweeting to typing process (the minute long pause in the middle is Twitter latency, we sped it up a bit)
[...] in the oomlout offices, everyone loves twitter. They love it so very much, they decided to find new and fun ways to participate. This one is the TwypeWriter. It searches for a keyword and then physically types out the results for everyone to peruse. There are a couple videos of it in action on their site, as well as the source code to make one for your self. [...]
[...] oomlut writes – The love for Twitter around the .:oomlout:. office is undeniable. We check it constantly, and as those of you who follow us know post to it far too often (or if you don’t follow us we’re @oomlout ). [...]
Someone likes android in those offices!
I’ve wanted to do this for a while…except with the Arduino programmed as a simple SSH client.
What is that plant thing bobbing up and down in the background?
Oh, cool hack too. I wonder if there is a way to interface directly with the electronics instead of spoofing keystrokes. I guess the brute force method is sometimes the fastest.
@John
…maybe
@SPI
Sounds cool. (would be well good if the typewriter keyboard was the input too)
@Brakk
Thats our solar plant (not as soulful as a real plant but does require much less watering). True there is nothing nuanced about this implementation. (maybe the next version will be an excuse for us to buy a proper scope so we can do it properly)
Yeah, what the heck was that weird plant?
I can’t stand Twitter, yet there’s something amazingly cool about this. For someone more ambitious than myself, I’d love to see the same concept with a mechanism to press the keys on an IBM Selectric!
Oh, great guys!
The only thing to make this one even cooler would be to let a motor-driven-hand do the actual tip on the keys.
Really nice!!
Best regards from germany!
Heye Digital Lab
I Want that plant! thats awesome! what is it?
Cool. I would want one that would send and recieve. Give it to my grandpa and have him twitter on it. It’s like being technically advanced.
In the second video, you can see how it is sped up by looking at the little plant thing.
Awesome Guys! Amazaing what can come from brilliant minds when they have spare parts, time and a crazy idea. And of course determination.
oh and so added to the twitter follow.
Are you planning to post some technical details about how you interface to the typewriter? Solder to which pins? Protocol?
“Congratulations”, very ecological, the nature thanked!
This is really really cool. I am very impressed. I also would love to see greater technical detail on the setup. I assume it takes a serial feed and pushes the data a character at a time through the arduino. Are you splitting output via a shift regsiter?
The next step is to flip a switch and be able to type in your username, text, and have it push it out to Twitter.
Here is solar strawberry:
http://www.diytrade.com/china/4/products/4373529/Solar_plants_strawberry_pot.html
I can’t believe I’m the only one saying this, but does anyone else think this is pretty regressive in terms of using paper needlessly? I’m not really into Twitter, but one positive thing about it is that it doesn’t use paper or create waste (other than which is created in the production of electricity).
I don’t expect people to inconvenience themselves too much to be green, but here’s an example of something totally useless being very wasteful.