When the east coast earthquake hit a little while ago, I found out about it first from a tweet, followed up by an IM from a friend in Brooklyn, followed up 10 minutes or so later by Google News. I thought it would be neat to have a way to call attention to important events. Inspired by old-fashioned ticker tapes, I put together some code to print specified Twitter updates in near-real-time to a thermal printer. More details in the video:
The tweets are fetched using the twitter Ruby gem, rendered into a PBM image with rmagick, and printed via the pbm2lwxl library. I’ll put the code up on github after a little cleanup. As an upgrade, I’m setting up the software to run on a NSLU2 single-board computer, so the printer doesn’t have to be tethered to my desktop. More on that in a bit!
EDIT: the code is now on Github here: https://github.com/riney/tickertweet-proto
Pingback: Spamming a label printer with #cookiehammer - Hack a Day
Pingback: Spamming a label printer with #cookiehammer | You've been blogged!
Pingback: Spamming a label printer with #cookiehammer | The Depot of Talk
Pingback: Spamming a label printer with #cookiehammer | Certified Ethical Hackers Information
Genious! It will cost you some money if you will get interest into some popular #hashtags
Pingback: Hack A Label Printer Into A Twitter Hashtag Ticker | Lifehacker Australia
Pingback: Spamming a label printer with #cookiehammer | CisforComputers
Great idea! Does it shutoff after say like 20 tweets though in a period of time, because if you printed every earthquake message then…
There’s currently no rate limiting. That’s not a bad idea though.
This is so great! Would you consider posting a full Instructable (or similar) for people with little coding experience? I want to make this so bad, and I’ve been looking through your references with much confusion as to where to start. Do you think that you could use an Adruino-based device to host the printer instead of an NAS? Thanks!
Absolutely! Maybe not with Instructables themselves (so many ads!) but I’ll do another video and a more in-depth blog post.
Arduino would be at least theoretically doable, but being able to leverage a full UNIX environment made things a loooooooot faster. Without Ruby, the Twitter and RMagick libraries, the open-source printer control program, and the factory drivers, not to mention USB support from the OS, you’d have to do a lot more low level coding to make things work. Doing antialiased TrueType font rendering on an 8-bit microcontroller isn’t my idea of a good time
Now that’s not to say that you couldn’t do a simpler version. If you could find a text-only printer with a serial interface, that would simplify the task a great deal.
Brilliant! I teach both art and communication technology in high school and would love to use this setup with the students to create some interesting media art. If possible could you please let me know when you release the code and if I can get further details?
Its quite a fun project.
TD
Absolutely. When I release more info, I’ll post it here, on Youtube, and Twitter (@riney). Thanks!
Can it run with Windows?
Can it check for trending tweets and tweets from certain users?
Do you use Dymo continuous paper roll, or simple thermal paper?
Hey man,
Love the idea!! I have a group at my school that would love to use this! could you maybe send us off the application to run it?
Adrian- Just plain old thermal receipt paper.
RATz – thanks for reminding me. I’ll slap the code up on github. It’s not pretty, and has a fair number of dependencies, but it’d be a good starting point.
Any updates to this project, Riney?
I’ve posted the code to Github here: https://github.com/riney/tickertweet-proto