Interactive Christmas Tree using Twitter

After designing a Twitter based installation for GE Healthcare, I looked forward to putting some Arduino’s and LED’s to work on a personal project. While speaking with Psytek, a founder of a hackerspace in Brooklyn called AlphaOneLabs, we decided an interactive Christmas tree would be a lot of fun. He bought a tree. I hunted for clear ornaments to stick the led’s into, and after coming up dry, we set out to make our own. I thought this would be the easy part, it wasn’t, I underestimated the elusive nature of ornaments in the wild. Eventually I found “golf display cases” at The Container Store. Cubist tree dressing, Picasso would be proud, so would the Borg (I honestly couldn’t stop thinking “resistance is futile” through this whole adventure). Ok, so, it was really easy to get the 12mil led’s into the cubes, & a bit of diffusion spray (aka frosting) from Rustoleum made the clear acrylic cubes look more like ornaments and did a good job of helping our very-directional led’s to provide better illumination. A netbook running Processing with Twitter4J is used for performing searches of predetermined holiday words (listed below) and generates a queue of ornament blinks. I know, you're wondering why I didn't use the trusty ol' ethernet shield? Well, some words came up much more frequently than others. The netbook acts like a queue manager, ensuring that the Arduino wouldn't get confused when it's own memory got hosed by a high frequency word, and possibly missing out on a low freq word as a result. It is much easier to manage this in Processing on the netbook and hand off a reliable buffer of "blinks".

Thanks to Psytek at AlphaOneLabs for the space, the tree, and for founding one of the coolest hackerspaces in NYC. Thanks also to RMD6502 (Robert) for use of his uln2803a chips, and pushing through when gremlins caused him to hang late, thank you sir. The uln2803a is new to me, it shifts registers allowing us to change my original set up and save on the number of Arduino’s and computing. Psytek and I ended up having problems with using the ULN2803a as intended but it ended up as a kind of multi-channel OpAmp to juice some hungry incandescent bulbs in the mix. [NOTE: I stand corrected - "uln2803a chips are darlington transistor arrays", they're not shift registers]

Below is the list of tweeted words that get our 4 cornered baubles all flashy. It'll be interesting to see how the frequency of “2009” vs. “2010” changes before and on New Year’s Eve. I’m also noticing a higher frequency of “xmas” vs. “Christmas”, makes sense since those on twitter try to make the most of their 140 characters.

Please visit AlphaOneLabs's post about the same build.

Twitter search terms include: Christmas, Xmas, Santa, mistletoe, hackerspace, alphaonelabs, hack, opensource, snow, season, merry, peace, cheer, consumerism, joy, presents, greetings, arduino, jingle bells, happy new year, 2010, 2009, reprap, Brooklyn