Hasta La Gadget!

If you are struggling to keep up with all the twitter updates from your friends, there’s a little robot that can help you out.

The ‘Guardian Robot’ is an adorable machine that monitors your twitter feed for “happy” or “sad” updates from friends and then alerts you of the tweets by either raising its hand for a high-five or lowering its head, reports U.K. publication The Guardian. The robot that can sit on your desk will even tweet a reply on your behalf from its own twitter id @guardianrobot

The Guardian Robot is not as sophisticated as the Cybraphon, a musical band housed inside an antique wardrobe that we recently wrote about. The Cybraphon monitors its Facebook, Twitter and Flickr pages and plays music that reflects its online popularity at that moment.

But what makes the Guardian Robot interesting is how inexpensively it has been put together. It costs just over £60 ($70).  It uses two servos–one to rotate the arm and another to raise or lower its head– and two microswitches. The body of the robot has been created out of a discarded Nintendo Wii Sports Resort game box.

All of this is connected to an Arduino board that powers and controls the switches. The Arduino, an open source single board microcontroller, is connected to a desktop via a USB. The board connects to an application written in the open source programming language, Processing 1.0.

The app polls Twitter every minute for tweets that match a specified criteria. When it finds a matching tweet it classifies it as a “happy” or sad one and directs the robot to the appropriate response.

For more details on the robot works or to see its actual code, check out The Guardian. 

See Also:

• Wired 14.01: The 50 Best Robots Ever
• Robot Teaches Itself to Smile
• Robot Band Plays Music, Obsesses About its Online Followers …
• Sony Camera Robot: You’ll Always Find Him On The Table at Parties …

Photo: Guardian Robot/The Guardian