A week ago, John did a story about businesses that use Twitter. I semi-seriously sent out a Tweet about making a John Campbell bobble head, where the head bobbles every time someone mentions the word “marvelous” anywhere in the public space on Twitter. A couple of people suggested I do it, so I decided to give it a crack. Why? Because it’s fun.

For the fellow geeks out there:
The bobble head is driven by our Telecontrol Project (click here to see more info). When a power and network cable is connected, it connects to our Telecontrol server. The Telecontrol server is monitoring Twitter for the occurrence of the word “marvelous”, and sends an instruction down to the bobble head every time the word gets mentioned. The head is rotated using a micro servo, typically used in RC models.

Enough of that, here is the video (my first actual appearance on video blog, I think I come across a little nervous at the start):

More information about the project can be found at this earlier blog post.

If the image is too dark to see the project, you can turn a light on.

If the camera feed doesn’t start, try this alternative link.

There is a bot running on the Telecontrol server which is monitoring the Twitter public stream for occurrences of pre-defined keywords in real time. As keywords occur, they’re recorded on the server along with the timestamp (in seconds) that the tweet was processed.

The Twitter Feed plugin is configured specifically for each Telecontrol device. The configuration states which keywords to monitor, and which shift register output to use for each keyword. The Twitter Feed plugin updates the shift register outputs once a second, and light all the LEDs that had activity for the previous second for 0.95 seconds. We use 0.95 seconds so that if a keyword is used for two seconds in a row, a quick flash will be seen to emphasis that the keyword has been used multiple times.

The video shows an example using data for the FIFA World Cup. There are a total of 35 LEDs. 32 LEDs are used for each of the team’s county codes, and 3 LEDs are used for the keywords “#worldcup”, “#kiwicount”, and “http://kturl.com/wc”.

The actual project can be seen online in real time via a webcam at the address http://kturl.com/wc.

If you have any questions or enquiries, you can message me via Twitter, the Contact page (found on the top menu), or leave a comment on this blog post.

I’ve been pretty busy this year. Real busy.

As some of you will already know, my wife and I had a daughter in January. Trust me, babies take a lot of time! She’s just passed the four month mark and she’s progressing really well. We are both very proud parents.

On a professional level, I’ve been spending a lot of time developing a Telecontrol product based on the Arduino platform. For those not familiar with Arduino, it is a very user friendly micro controller platform. You can find out all about it at the official Arduino website, http://www.arduino.cc.

I want to take the Telecontrol product further, and I’m keen to find people out there who might be keen to help test it out. If you have an Arduino 328p board, and an Ethernet Shield, let me know if you’re keen to try it out. I’ll be posting videos to give in-depth (yet simple) instructions on how it works, and some neat projects that can be done with it.

It’s a very high level explanation. If you’re interested in playing around with the technology of telecontrol (it’s not just limited to Christmas lights of course, take a look at my other telecontrol project) then send me a message via the Contact page. I have ioBridge units available for sale, and can point you in the right direction for the Arduino product line. We’re also looking at putting together kits for the relay driver arrays. If you’re interested, let me know!

So, enough talk. Here’s the video:

The MP3 of the interview can be downloaded via the following link:
http://wwwstatic.kennedytechnology.com/pacificlights_2009_more_fm_interview_2009-12-02.mp3

Recorded as the sun was setting in the west, which shows a little more detail of the house itself.

Not much will change in regards to the normal display this year, but at least one new song will be added to the show.

One exciting feature that is being brought back this year is the web controlled display. It was proven to be quite popular in 2007, and people were asking where it was last year – so  it’s making a come back for 2009.

For the web control this year we’ll be using an ioBridge module along with an Arduino micro controller. We also intend to write blog posts about how it all works etc, and make modules available for sale so that other people can experiment with the technology.

So, keep an eye on the blog. Hopefully you’ll get something out of it!