I present… the TwitterMatrixTicker! I currently have it configured to watch for any tweets mentioning me (@KWF), and then having it print each tweet line by line on this great piece of printer history, so feel free to send me tweets and enjoy the thought of them interrupting my evening as they print out on this ridiculous loud monstrosity.
The hardware is relatively straight forward; a BeagleBone (Thanks to TI for giving me one for free!) uses Twitter’s API to search for @KWF tweets, then parses out the usernames and text and sends it to the Star NP-10 over a USB-to-Centronics adapter.
New from the fine people who have brought us the Beagle Board, we now have a smaller, lighter, but powerful single board linux computer, Beagle Bone! We like this move to a more compact and integrated SBC. For example, there is onboard Ethernet and USB host, as well as a USB client interface (a FTDI chip for shell access). It even comes preloaded with Angstrom Linux on the 4 GB microSD card!
Make a robot friend with Adafruit’s CRICKIT – A Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit. It’s an add-on to our popular Circuit Playground Express, FEATHER and other platforms to make and program robots with CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. Start controlling motors, servos, solenoids. You also get signal pins, capacitive touch sensors, a NeoPixel driver and amplified speaker output. It complements & extends your boards so you can still use all the goodies on the microcontroller, now you have a robotics playground as well.
