Short script to send Twitter mention messages to a serial port using Ruby and the gems twitter and serialport.

# Find your Twitter Mentions and send them to Arduino on Serial Port
require “rubygems”
require “twitter” #https://github.com/sferik/twitter for config details
require “serialport” #http://rubygems.org/gems/serialport
require “pp”
prevID = 0
puts “Setting Up Serial Port”
myport = SerialPort.new("/dev/ttyACM0",“9600”.to_i)
sleep(10)
while true
puts “Checking for mentions”
latestMention = Twitter.mentions(:count => 1)[0]
if prevID != latestMention.id
msg = latestMention.user.screen_name + " " + latestMention.text
puts “-” + msg
bytes = myport.write(msg)
puts “-” + bytes.to_s
prevID = latestMention.id
else
puts “-No new updates”
end
sleep 60
end
myport.close

Doodle’s Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery

First test of Twitter updates getting written to the Arduino from Ruby didn't go quite right as seen from the video below, some debugging required.

Testing writing the same message from the Arduino IDE gives the same results so looks like problem is in the Arduino code. Maybe the message is too long for the LCD's buffer?



The Twitter to Serial port Ruby script can be found at https://github.com/alastairhm/arduino/tree/master/SerialMessage

Doodle's Geek Monkey by Alastair Montgomery