Inspired by Dan Aldred‘s LEGO Clock hacks (http://www.tecoed.co.uk/darth-beats.html and http://www.tecoed.co.uk/yoda-tweets.html) I picked up a broken Batman clock from eBay for some hacking shenanigans. I had several aims, based on the great work of Dan before me
This project was inspired by the work of Andy Stanford-Clark (@andyc) and Lucy Rogers (@drlucyrogers). They used NodeRED to control a Maplin Action Dino kit via the Twitter hashtag #wakedino. When a tweet containing #wakedino is found by the NodeRED script, the motor is started, which in turn makes the dinosaur nod up and down.
I opted to recreate their work in Python using the Tweepy library. I also wanted to build upon the NodeRed implementation with the addition of sound, and the capturing and tweeting of an image. Continue reading
The blame for this little project can be firmly placed at the door of @SouthendRPiJams (aka Andy) after I signed up to be an Exhibitor at the Southend Raspberry Jam on 21st Feb. He dropped me a DM and the conversation went like this
SRJ:
We’re doing Astropi this jam but the HAT won’t be out. If you could show some of the equivalent AstroPi hardware and code working to help give people ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.
OK, so not quite the Sheldon Virtual Presence Device from Big Bang Theory but who knows…. maybe my next version?
I have had various bits of robots floating around for a while now and never actually pulled them all together. I’ve made both a Scratch, and a PS3 controlled, Pibrella powered bot which I must blog about one of these days. I also built one from LEGO motors and a SN754410 H-bridge a year or two back, but the motors were old (20+ years) and it didn’t get far. Continue reading
Cheerlights is a IoT based light control system, originally intended to allow social media to dictate the colour of festive lights around the world.
The current cheerlight status
Put the word Cheerlight and a colour in a tweet and you’ve just told light systems around the world the colour they should show. On the website is a list of the currently supported colours.
On the back-end there is a feed aggregator which exposes a JSON, TXT or XML API. Continue reading