Making Stuff: The Twitterbox

I've had a fascination recently with using dedicated physical items for presenting digital information. It's like the idea of an analog wall clock - a smart phone hung on the wall would still tell the time, but it wouldn't be the same. It just doesn't have the same opportunities for form and texture that a physical object does.

Plus, I really wanted to play with a newly purchased Digispark board and LCD shield from www.digistump.com. In particular, I wanted a paperweight sized piece to display search results from Twitter. Right now it searches for Tweets about "love" or "cookies" which are frequently the same Tweet :-).

I started development just trying to pull Tweets through Twitter's API with a Python script. Once I got that running, I started working on getting the Digispark going with the LCD shield.

The LCD has a 16 character wide, 2 line display, with a 40 character wide register. Tweets can be up to 140 characters wide, so I write to the register off the screen letter by letter and then scroll the message. Once the Python script was talking to the Digispark board and successfully displaying tweets on the LCD, I started doodling through various ideas for a case. I wanted the case to house the circuit board, but I also wanted part of the circuit board to be exposed, to show that this was something I made.

Once I knew where I wanted to go, it was time to work on a CAD model of what I had in mind. From there, I made a print on my 3d printer. After that, a bit of sanding, some Bondo, some more sanding, paint, and here it is!