The Arudino is set up to respond to the tweets that the entire community of twitter is posting. The program is designed so that whenever anyone in the world tweets the term “emergency”, the red LED’s flash. The Arduino is scanning twitter every twelve seconds, the maximum number of requests that twitter allows in an hour, for the term emergency. Important to recognize is that the lights flash every time the Arduino searches for the word emergency, and more importantly, if the delay of 12 seconds was removed, the light would be constantly flashing or remain constantly on. The idea was to represent the prevalence of the emergency concept in modern society. People seem to be under the impression that either the state of the world or the state of one’s own life is in disarray or emergency always. Society has become fixated on the idea that every problem earns the right to be an emergency- be it a real or imagined one.

Also demonstrated by this real world example:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/11/fema-to-test-nationwide-emergency-alert-system-at-2-pm-et/1?csp=34news

The first idea is to have a small sound recorder hidden under a coffee table in a coffee shop. Every fifteen minutes the sound recorder records fifteen seconds of sound and uploads it to twitter. The idea is that every hour or half an hour or fifteen minutes someone new is sitting at the table and having a random or meaningful conversation. With fifteen seconds recorded we can have a rough idea of what is going on and in a way get a snapshot into someone’s daily life.

Put a touch sensor in your hand for a day and every time you touch something it tweets. The idea is that you become aware of the interactions that you have everyday. And also of the times when those interactions occur. Maybe you can see patterns from everyday and understand more about yourself, maybe nothing significant actually happens and you don’t find anything interesting. I think its worth the experiment though.

More on the business side, something that could be interesting to make is an app that tweets every time a cash register opens. This way, the owner can keep better track of what is going on in his business. Maybe he can get useful information of unusual movement like the register opening at 3:00 AM or opening too much at a particular time.

1. Tweet the physical states of my body, like my body temperature or the speed at which I am moving, at constant intervals

2. Carry around an arduino with ethernet shield, push button to tweet every time I see someone hot

3. Tweet every time I smile

Send a message everytime bathroom door is open.

Hack glucose meter to send message with glucose reading everytime it is measured.

Send a message based on what side of the bed you are sleeping.

1. placing sensors all over my apartment to tell me what my cat is doing while I’m gone.

2. sensors in my cat’s food bowl that says how much food there is

3. temperature sensors outside my window to tell me whether I need a coat

Something that tweets my dogs thoughts based on certain brain outputs.

Tweeting my feelings (a predecided message) based on my own physical output (heartrate, brain activity, etc.)

Tweeting to people- (using @) based on certain key words which indicate sadness- cute animal pictures.

These are some project ideas I had for the Twitter and Arduino project:

1. The idea of having something that tweets (twits?) when a sensor is activated doesn’t really appeal to me, however, being able to control something with a tweet does. I would like to build some sort of program that would make it so that people could tweet and control the colors in a RGB led contained in some sort other apparatus. That way people could create specific colors with a tweet.

2. If I was to use some sort of sensor, I would like to use a GPS sensor that would randomly, or at a set interval, tweet my exact GPS coordinates to Twitter. I think this would be interesting since I could then map the information to form a sort of path throughout my day. However, I don’t know if the GPS shield would be needed for this or a sensor (do they make sensors for that?).

3. Finally, I would use a light sensor to tweet everytime I change from a specific area of light to a rather dark area.

– You could put a tilt sensor on a toilet flusher so it tweeted every time someone went into the bathroom.

-you could have a camera placed somewhere (like a doorway) and every time someone walks through the doorway, their picture is taken and then posted on twitter.

-you could put a gps in your shoe and tweet your location every so often.

-some sort of sensor that detects movement (tilt maybe?) in combination with a lillypad arduino so that every time you got undressed it tweeted.

-Place a radiation sensor in the labs around campus, doherty studios too, and have it tweet every so often

Some ideas I thought would make use of Twitter and the Arduino in interesting ways:

1. A device that was attached to your face near your eyes, and could tell when your eyes were closed. I’m not sure exactly how this would work, but it would somehow be able to sense when your eyes were closed, and infer things from this information. It could count the number of times you blink (which might be interesting to compare from day to day), or see if there were certain times when your time of blinking lasted longer than other times. It could also be used to see how long you closed your eyes when falling asleep in class (which would be pretty interesting for me at least). It would also be interesting to see the results for when you were falling asleep at night. Perhaps after a certain amount of time closed, a tweet could be sent saying that you were asleep. Because you can’t really send a tweet once you are asleep, this could be pretty useful (depending on the circumstances).

2. Hooking up a light sensor to something like a phone. This way, you could tell how many times you took the object out of your pocket, and see an overall reading for how long it was being used (perhaps a light senor would not be the best because it isn’t necessarily light outside of your pocket). Perhaps a light sensor could be placed in the inside of wallet to see when it was actually opened. The idea of using sensors to see when something occurs, and for how long, (similar to my idea for #1) is pretty intriguing to me.

3. My last idea is for (the somewhat cliche idea) of some type of sensor to see how someone was feeling. Perhaps reading their pulse somehow, or taking their temperature, or even combining multiple sensor values such as these. I think it would be interesting to be able to see what times of day you were excited, nervous, etc. Trying to remember what was happening at a certain time to make you react in such a way, and the reaction itself, would be pretty cool. I think a tweet alerting people that you were in a stressful situation could be pretty interesting as well. It might be difficult for the sensors to determine what was actually happening to you, but being able to broadcast how you were feeling through values instead of words would be nice.

1. Twitter seems as though it can be an constant stream of information at times and I would like to make a stream of liquid controlled by pressure either being applied or released by a servo motor. When twitter messages were posted to my accounted the stream of liquid would flow. When there were no tweets, the servo would cut off the water supply. This would be a way of physically measuring the amount of data provided to us in a real-time format.

2. I am interested in having an event triggered when a chosen twitter source posts a tweet and was inspired by Ellie Harrison’s Vending Machine, (./10/11/vending-machine-ellie-harrison_lookingoutwards4/). I primarily follow art institutions on my twitter account and was thinking about triggering an action or projection in response to those particular sources. I am still thinking about exactly what this action or image would be and its significance. Perhaps using the tweets from these sources to generate a drawing or art of my own, creating a somewhat un-known and removed collaboration with these institutions.

3. Following the same thought process described in idea #1, I am considering making a kinetic sculpture, using motors connected to an arduino, that’s movement would be dependent on receiving tweets from a chosen source. Possible ideas to explore are how lines of formality and casualty are treated with online medias. I am also interested by the increased accessibility that twitter provides to a large amount of information in a brief format and feel an action could be created to exemplify this as well.