When you work in an office there is usually a board up front that indicated who is in and out. At home there is no such convenience, but even if there was where are the your other family members? That problem has been solved by The Magic Clock, it uses Twitter and some electronics to physically display where everyone is. The old clock case and great looking face detail make this at home in any house.
"Here’s the general logic it uses.
My final design uses a script to fetch four twitter feeds every couple minutes.
The script then parses out the first words and searches for a matching ‘status’.
If no match is found, it sets the status to ‘Read Me’
The script outputs a string with the hand number followed by a separator character, and then a letter from a-l for the status like ’1>d2>b3>g4>a’. This would set the 1 hand to ‘school’ the 2 hand to ‘Church’, the 3 hand to ‘Home’ and the 4 hand to ‘Mortal Peril’.
The string is passed to the arduino which checks if the hand location is known. If it is and hasn’t changed, it does nothing. If it’s unknown or changed, it drives the corresponding servo to the new location and stores the current location."
[...] You know that clock Mrs. Weasley used to track members of her family at all times? Well, some guy actually built it using an arduino board that parses a few Twitter feeds. No wand or incantations (beyond expletives) required. [HackedGadgets] [...]
[...] This is one very cool (and pretty good-looking project). It fetches Twitter status updates every few minutes and looks for key words to match up to its many locations, including School, Home, Travelling, Prison, Texas and Mortal Peril. That information is relayed to the clock’s Arduino brain, which flips the corresponding arm to the right status. It even takes inspiration from the Weasley’s clock by including that last “mortal peril” option, though I’m not exactly sure that someone actually in mortal peril would have the time or motivation to Twitter that specific status. Still, take that, JK Rowling! Your creations aren’t so magical now, are they? [The Magic Clock via Coolest Gadgets via Hacked Gadgets] [...]
[...] This is one very cool (and pretty good-looking project). It fetches Twitter status updates every few minutes and looks for key words to match up to its many locations, including School, Home, Travelling, Prison, Texas and Mortal Peril. That information is relayed to the clock’s Arduino brain, which flips the corresponding arm to the right status. It even takes inspiration from the Weasley’s clock by including that last “mortal peril” option, though I’m not exactly sure that someone actually in mortal peril would have the time or motivation to Twitter that specific status. Still, take that, JK Rowling! Your creations aren’t so magical now, are they? [The Magic Clock via Coolest Gadgets via Hacked Gadgets] [...]
November 29th, 2009
Very nice. Maybe you could have the hands different lengths so you can see individual faces when they are all pointing at the same place.
November 30th, 2009
[...] You know that clock Mrs. Weasley used to track members of her family at all times? Well, some guy actually built it using an arduino board that parses a few Twitter feeds. No wand or incantations (beyond expletives) required. [HackedGadgets] [...]
November 30th, 2009
[...] a little bit of the mechanics behind [...]
December 2nd, 2009
[...] Source [...]
December 2nd, 2009
THIS IS SO COOL!!!!!
Can I buy one somewhere?
December 3rd, 2009
[...] This is one very cool (and pretty good-looking project). It fetches Twitter status updates every few minutes and looks for key words to match up to its many locations, including School, Home, Travelling, Prison, Texas and Mortal Peril. That information is relayed to the clock’s Arduino brain, which flips the corresponding arm to the right status. It even takes inspiration from the Weasley’s clock by including that last “mortal peril” option, though I’m not exactly sure that someone actually in mortal peril would have the time or motivation to Twitter that specific status. Still, take that, JK Rowling! Your creations aren’t so magical now, are they? [The Magic Clock via Coolest Gadgets via Hacked Gadgets] [...]
December 5th, 2009
[...] This is one very cool (and pretty good-looking project). It fetches Twitter status updates every few minutes and looks for key words to match up to its many locations, including School, Home, Travelling, Prison, Texas and Mortal Peril. That information is relayed to the clock’s Arduino brain, which flips the corresponding arm to the right status. It even takes inspiration from the Weasley’s clock by including that last “mortal peril” option, though I’m not exactly sure that someone actually in mortal peril would have the time or motivation to Twitter that specific status. Still, take that, JK Rowling! Your creations aren’t so magical now, are they? [The Magic Clock via Coolest Gadgets via Hacked Gadgets] [...]