Yesterday the team of Mobile Monday went to Protospace, to play with their devices in their lab. They have a big lasercutter, different computer driven milling machines, and a 3D printer. We had a tour of the lab, and went over all the machines. For example, I never realised there are shapes that can only be generated by printing them on a 3D printer. 

As project for the day we decided to build a device that would respond to input from Twitter. We wanted to build something that could respond to input by the audience, and we could use at our events. 

We used one of the first IObridge devices. They are a nice box you connect to the internet, hook up with sensors and actuators, and then controll via their API’s.  At first I wasn’t too happy with their API: I was planning to controll the Iobridge from PHP running on a server. Unfortunatally, for now they only offer an (obfuscated) Javascript API. But IObridge was quick to reach out on Twitter and gave me alpha access to their data API. However at that point most allready worked with Javascript.

We built a meter (see first image) with a needle that moves, comparing the number of tweets for 2 different keywords, based on the Twitter Search API. It checks every 5 seconds for new tweets containing terms, calculates the new value, and updates the needle.

The board, needle and stand were  cut with their lasercutting, including the nice gradient.  It works beautifully, and we allready got good responses on the live stream. We’ll probably show it on one of the next Momo’s.  

Geek note: If you include their Javascript widget you can use 

widgetSetString('WIDGETID',to);

to set the widget to a new value)

MoMo Apple

Movie of the apple being burnt can be seen at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcfonteijn/3201488272/