Tweetagraph - The Tweeting Telegraph!
Follow me on Twitter at #joester5
I'm still ironing the kinks out but it seems to be working pretty well. Now I have to learn Morse Code which is bloody annoying. At least I only need to learn to write it!
It's Tweetagraph and not Twittergraph because Twitter doesn't like you using the word "twitter" if you are tapping into their API. Fair enough I guess. Teletweet is an option too, but the Teletubby connection is too strong for me.
Here's a video of me trying to tweet "what hath god wrought". yes, I have a long way to go.
The Tweetargraph uses an arduino to capture the dots and dashes created by the telegraph. The Arudio itself is running Firmata (now comes as a built in library with the arduino software) so that it can talk to Processing. The Processing sketch is using the java library twitter4j which handles the communication with the Twitter API. You need to establish a Twitter account (obviously) but you also need to "register" your application through Twitter. This is new - as of the summer of 2010 Twitter uses OAuth for their permissions. Here's the twitter page to begin authenticating. Admittedly, this can be a bit confusing - you need authorization codes AND also the "token" and the "token secret" codes.
Twitter4J does not have very good documentation online when it comes to integrating it into Processing, but robotgrrl does an awesome job of walking you through the process.
I found that acquiring the token and token secret through Twitter is much easier than through processing as robotgrrl has you doing in steps three through six (to be fair to robotgrrl that was probably the only way to get the token at the time of writing).
Processing, arduino, twitter4j and twitter are all free and open source. The arduino micro-controller costs about $35 US, and the telegraph I got on ebay for $27.
You can download my Processing code here. Please respect the Creative Common license below. I wasn't really writing it with public consumption in mind, but you're welcome to take a look at what I did. If you're new to Processing and the Arduino, this is not the best project to start with.
Joe McKay 2011
Tweetagraph by Joe McKay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at robotgrrl.com.