New Twitter Box

I'll start by admitting outright that the "real" reason for building this is that A) I found this really cool box at The RE Store in Ballard, and B) I wanted to make something with my new Arduino. For those of you unfamiliar, but curious what an Arduino is, you should come to my brown bag talk on September 27th. I'm going to talk about the project and geek out with other nomads about fun electrical projects we've done or would like to do.

So what does it do?!?

The Twitter Box searches twitter for mentions of @officenomads and each time it finds something new it activates the big red light for 10 seconds. The LCD I used isn't big enough to show the actual tweet (I only have 16 chars to work with) but it does shout out the twitter handle of the tweet if found. It takes a few seconds to pull up the newest tweet and this is by design. Twitter has a lot of people hitting it at all times and doesn't want you to send too many searches over and over again. I pass the time by displaying fun statistics on the LCD like the number of tweets and the number of loops it's made since it was powered up.Watch this fun video and see it in action!Twitter Box: Social Media Instigation Device from Office Nomads on Vimeo.