The most challenging part of this project so far is finding the best tool for the job.

Being able to program a software to recognise a specific tweet and have that data translate to a real world action is a challenging process.

Being a novice with coding, especially with the Arduino IDE software, I started my research by looking at IFTTT, which we had already been shown working with littleBits.

The basic idea behind IFTTT is to create ‘recipes’ whereby, if something happens, it makes something else happen as well. This way you can connect two completely separate programs together, including Twitter. In fact, it is possible to use IFTTT to search for a specific tweet, and make something else happen upon finding it.

An example I made to demonstrate this working was to look for #bieber, and send me an email each time it’s tweeted.

Whilst I showed that this does work, I recommend always remembering to switch it off as soon as possible, unfortunately my email account wasn’t so lucky.

 

One of the drawbacks with using IFTTT however, is that it only requests data from twitter roughly every 20 – 30 minutes. This then wouldn’t be so useful for my twitter powered Scalextric. However, it could still provide useful for other related projects.

I then moved on to look at a program called Octoblu. This is similar to IFTTT except here you create ‘flows.’ You can link lots of different channels together with the idea of being able to connect any devices.

An example of a flow.

This program doesn’t have the drawback of only connecting to Twitter every 20 – 30 minutes, so it could still prove useful. However, I found it quite challenging trying to get it to work with an Arduino. More experimentation and research with different softwares is still required.