{"id":95,"date":"2015-10-12T22:13:44","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T22:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joelherber.com\/?p=95"},"modified":"2019-12-27T16:05:37","modified_gmt":"2019-12-27T16:05:37","slug":"mr-penguin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joelherber.com\/?p=95","title":{"rendered":"Mr Penguin – A twitter controlled bubble robot"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the last couple of lunchtimes\u00a0I have been working with my technical director Alan to create a bubble machine that could respond to our social media presence.
\nMeet Mr P<\/p>\n

\"Mr<\/a><\/p>\n

We brought a kids bubble machine for a couple of quid<\/a>\u00a0and modified the switch on top so it was linked by a transistor. This transistor was then enabled and disabled by the GPIO socket on a Raspberry Pi, which we then switched on and off using a simple node.js program.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20151005_133209\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Twitter API has two REST callbacks which are were helpful for us to\u00a0respond to our presence.<\/p>\n

Firstly, one call to get the all the retweets of the logged in user
\n<\/a>Secondly, one call to get the list of followers<\/a><\/p>\n

I wrote the program to poll these callbacks every minute and to detect any changes.<\/p>\n

Lastly, the program also posts to our company Slack channel, detailing what Mr P is excited about.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here’s a copy of the source code<\/a> and here’s a video of the little guy in action.<\/p>\n