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)