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Use coloured lights to represent trending topics on twitter and watch them blend
Each set of keywords is bound to a colour channel
Every time a tweet occurs, a fixed 1s of time is added to the pulse
Cumulative tweets will extend the time the light is on for
Multiple colour channels can be used. In this example it's just red and blue.
Each channel operates independently so blending can occur between them.
Lights are connected to an arduino with each light channel on a PWM output pin
The arduino has an ethernet shield which attaches it to the network.
A python application on the computer processes tweets using the twitter streaming API
Each tweet causes a pulse message to be sent to the arduino via a simple HTTP call.
This prevents the arduino from crashing under load from high velocity topics.
Checkout more at http://maker.ajfisher.me