BlinkyScreen 2.0

Since Twitter is great for data mining, i hacked together a prototype, also since the weather was great this weekend it's really a hack that needs some (well a lot) of rework, probably need to dive into python multithreading, or reimplent the whole stuff in another programming language, would be a cool project to dive into go once.

The Idea is to use tweepy's streaming API to filter tweets for up to 512 words stored in a wordlist. 
Then whenever a tweet is written, the coresponding LED gets a bit brighter, until it overruns an start again, so you'll end up with LED blinking faster on often used keywords and slower on less often. (while writing this description: pulsing would be cool too)

Sorry no video right now, because I really just finished the first code yesterday night, and need to think of 512 keywords first.

Finally some electronics not used anymore ....

The yellow PCB is an USB hub, which I used to both power the RasPi and the USB WiFi adaptor.

Some words on the buildup.

I lasercuted three sheets of acrylic. Two times in black one in some translucent white. They are held together by distance bolts. My Idea was to screw the LED panels to the middle one and the rest of the electronics to the bottom one... Well, since holes didn't fit, I ended up using hotglue.

For the panels i took some wood, which was laying around to make some spacers, glued them to the middlepanel and used velcro to mount the LED panels to them.

For the connection of the panels I used some cables with servoconnectors on both sides and pinheaders on both the leds as well as on the power distribution boards.

Back in the days I had a Processing sketch which visualized the computer's mic in some different ways:

• Big dots for frequency analysis.
• Some waveform of the input ( more in a artistic way)
• Some agent moving around, speed is controlled by the input volume

Plus rotation of the whole stuff which can be switched on or off, speed is also depending on the input volume.

Example (sorry no videgrapher here, just a guy with a smartphone ;) )