Category Archives: IoT

Tweeting Dinosaur

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

A #CheerLights Virtual Christmas Tree

What is #CheerLights?

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

How does it work?

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

Inventing with the IoT – Extension Task

If you have not read Inventing with the IoT – Workshop go do so first, otherwise this will make less sense than usual!

As I said in my previous post, I never actually worked with the IoT code before the workshop, so I downloaded it and combined it with my PiDuino code from earlier this week.  As a result I have an Internet of Things NeoPixel ring.

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IoT NeoPixel ring being modelled by Babbage

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Inventing with the IoT – Workshop

CamJam has a lot to answer for; mainly the evaporation of my evenings this past week. During the jam I helped run the “Inventing with the Internet of Things” workshop, I had no idea what it was all about as it was a last minute thing but I know enough Python and the principles of networking to bumble along. The workshop was run by David Whale in conjunction with IoTic Labs

@whalegeek & @geeky_tim demonstrate the "Internet of Things"

@whalegeek & @geeky_tim demonstrate the “Internet of Things”

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