Pimpy3wash just finished doing a round of laundry. Hacklab.toilet just flushed and mattsoffice tweeted that the temperature is 83.3° F.
It might seem like just another day in the Twitterverse, where prosaic, personal updates stream throughout the day. Except @Pimpy3wash, @hacklab.toilet and @mattsoffice are not real people: They are a washing machine, a toilet and an array of home light and temperature sensors. Each of them, with help from some microcontrollers, wires and Arduino boards, have been rigged to answer Twitter’s basic question: “What are you doing?”
“It started as a joke,” says Seth Hardy, a researcher for an anti-virus company who modified his toilet to tweet. “I don’t like Twitter much and think everyone puts up very mundane stuff on Twitter. I thought, ‘Why not have my toilet in there, too?’ Now it’s turned into a fun way to test out the Arduino boards.” His twittering toilet, @hacklab.toilet, now has more than 580 followers.
As Twitter’s use has exploded, the service has seen a twittering cat (the British kitty, Sockington, is fast approaching a million followers), a duck, an R2D2 and even a kegerator that tweets from Wired.com’s office. But unlike these profiles, where humans are merely pretending to be the cat or robot on whose behalf they post, tweets from appliances are the real thing.
Hooking up home appliances is part geek bravado, part insider joke and part open-source hardware experiment. And it illustrates the larger trend of home automation that is catching on among do-it-yourselfers.
“Tweeting appliances speaks to this whole ‘internet of things’ idea,” says Hans Scharler, a tech consultant who also writes comedy material. “If your appliances were outputting information, it can always go to a database. But we love to share information. So why not find a way to do that?” Scharler found online fame for his twittering toaster, whose tweets alternate between “toasting” and “toast is done.” @mytoaster has about 200 twitter followers.
Among the first kits to help DIYers get their appliances tweeting was the Tweet-a-watt. The $90 open source hardware kit from Adafruit Industries let users post the daily energy consumption of their refrigerator or TV set to a Twitter account. The Tweet-a-watt also lets receivers log and graph the power consumption information.
“We feel there is a social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH (kilowatts per hour),” says the company on its blog. “By sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter, users can compete for the lowest numbers and also see how they’re doing compared to their friends and followers.”
But to go beyond that, DIYers have devised their own homebrew solution. And driving their interest are modules available for hobbyists from companies such as Adafruit and ioBridge.
Scharler says the off-the-shelf IO-204 monitor and control module allowed him to bring his toaster online without having to run a home server. All it took was a few hours on Thanksgiving Day to get his BagelMaster tweeting. Scharler glued a switch to the toaster’s exterior that is triggered by the slider’s movement. The switch hooks up to the control module’s digital input.
“Using a terminal board, a pull-up resistor (1k), and some alligator clips, I hooked up the resistor from the digital input to the +5v source from the module, and clipped my clips on the resistor and the ground,” Scharler explains on his blog.
The real gem in this hack is the control module from ioBridge, which is available for $88. It can bring most devices online and you don’t need to be a programming or electronics whiz to hook it up, says the company.
“There was all this excitement around twitter last year,” says Scharler. “But at the same time I had been playing with the ioBridge controller so I decided to get them both together.”
Scharler posted a guide to creating the twittering toaster on Instructables, a website with lots of instructions on how to complete various DIY projects. “It’s not very difficult for someone with no programming experience to do. That’s the whole purpose of the ioBridge module. You don’t have to touch a line of code, you don’t need too many resistors or any weird things like that.”
The twittering toaster went on to inspire Matthew Morey, an engineer at Texas Instruments, to create his own twittering appliances. In less than a month, Morey found a way to get the temperature and lighting of his single-family home in Houston on Twitter. A typical post from those sensors reads: Temperature = 82.5°F / Ambient Light = 901. Morey can also send commands to his appliances via Twitter. Doing that is as easy as sending a reply with words such ‘@MattsOffice light on’ or ‘@MattsOffice light off’ to turn on or off the light at his desk.
“I can adjust the air conditioning or the wireless security camera to take a picture of a particular spot in the backyard through Twitter,” he says.
The output from the light and temperature sensors could have well gone into a e-mail alert or even a database, says Morey, but tweeting is a lot more fun.
Though Morey doesn’t have a step-by-step guide on how you can do this yourself, he says he hopes to publish that on his site soon. Right now, his website offers the code that he is using to auto-update the Twitter account.
But keeping your followers on twitter is no easy task, as Hardy’s toilet discovered. A broken switch in the middle of the night led to a malfunction that had the toilet twittering more updates about flushing than its followers could handle. The toilet lost a few hundred followers the next day.
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Photo: Twittering toilet/Seth Hardy
