August 31, 2012

DIY twitter-controlled message display

 Although originally designed to be an automated way of leaving messages on your office door, this project can be used anywhere that an Ethernet-enabled Arduino board can be installed. Using some nifty coding, the Ardiuno can parse an RSS feed from your twitter account and display messages on an LCD module when the appropriate sequence of characters has been detected in the feed. This could be considered a one-way paging unit where the message comes from the twitter world. Furthermore it can also read the temperature from an external service and display this as well. Neat.


Although this may sound complex, it's pretty easy. So click here to get started. And we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.

Looking to do this for yourself? Then you need an Ethernet-enabled Arduino board. We have two, the Freetronics EtherTen:


... the Arduino-Uno compatible with onboard Ethernet, microSD socket and optional PoE. Or if you need an Arduino Mega2560 board, consider the Freetronics EtherMega:


Quite simply the EtherMega is the fully-loaded Arduino-compatible board on the market today. Apart from being completely Arduino Mega2560-compatible, it includes full Ethernet interface, a microSD card socket, full USB interface, optional Power-over-Ethernet support and still has a circuit prototyping area with extra I2C interface pins. So if your project is breaking the limits, upgrade to the EtherMega today. 


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