What the heck is a Dancing Bird Subscription Notifier?
Like many companies, Safari’s projects are given an internal secret codename that follow a pattern. In Google’s case that pattern is alphabetically ordered confectionary; in our case it’s bird names.
With Safari Flow, an all-new product, we re-architected many of our systems, and we decided to build the user database in Salesforce.com. I realized that we could have some fun whenever a new subscriber joined, alerting the team in the San Francisco office to the good news. So we (OK, I) built Chirpy as a side project, unknown to the rest of the team. Chirpy is a dancing mechanical “bird” who alerts us in a spectacular manner for each new subscription to Safari Flow.
The short version is that whenever a new subscription is created in Salesforce, that event triggers an email to an internal gmail account, which is then picked up by Chirpy. Chirpy – built out of a combination of an old wine box, some oak flooring scraps, a Lego Gearbox, a Raspberry Pi, powered speakers and a lot of cardboard, wire and hot glue – then plays a mating call and spins its spirograph (early Flow Beta testers may recognize these?), all while flapping his wings and flashing some LEDs (Flow colors, of course).
Small Reduction Stepper Motor – 5VDC 512 Step – This is a great first stepper motor, good for small projects and experimenting with steppers. This uni-polar motor has a built in mounting plate with two mounting holes. There are only 8 steps per revolution, but inside is a 1/64 reduction gear set. What this means is that there are really 8*64 steps per revolution = 512 steps! (read more)
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