Analogue Twitter!

April 6 2011
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Here’s Tara playing around with it. Better video next week

I put up a whiteboard that can send to Twitter whatever you write or draw on it in the UID foyer.

Draw or write on it, hit the big red button and erase the board for the next user. Please tweet comments or ideas about the system and how to make it better as well

It will send your comments or drawings to Twitter via Twitpic Flickr. Use Google Chrome, Safari or Firefox with Power Twitter extension to see the images directly on your Twitter.

The boards account is @analoguetweet

http://twitter.com/analoguetweet

The “code” or “script” part is a really nasty hack job, so it will probably fail once in a while. If you see an error message saying something about “connection error” on the screen, press the tiny button that says “debug” and hit the big red button again.  If it fails to tweet whatever you wrote or drew, just do it again. If that doesn’t work, come and get me.

***UPDATE*** Switched image hosting to Flickr, although slower, it seems to be more robust, ie. hitting that big red button will most likely now upload the tweet. With Twitpic/Amazon S3, the success rate was about 50%, and with more complex tweets around 0%.

I also added a progress bar and some delays to the script to make it even more robust.  The system will be up the whole day today and back on Monday. Happy Tweeting!

from: Interaction Design

9 Comments leave a new comment!
April 6 2011
pepe permalink

WOW that´s something BIG! I would like to see some pics or vids of people doodling. What about a board-webpage where I can participate too

Congrats MP!

April 6 2011
Mikko permalink

Video coming up hopefully tomorrow. As a proof-of-concept it works, it’s just horribly hack-y and the tweeting upload fails every one and then, especially with more complex doodles. I don’t know if the problem is with the script (most likely) or that Amazon S3 needs a bit more time for the upload to happen, which again is a problem with the script. I need to redo the whole system some day with proper Twitpic API and a cheaper sensor (like IR camera).

April 7 2011
Peter permalink

Great idea! Would be interesting to have both the twitpics and the text with something like http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/ . What kind of sensor do you use now?

April 7 2011
Mikko permalink

Yes Peter, Tesseract or CellWriter would be the next step. Although that would discard the “being-able-to-draw-your-tweet” part. The sensor is now eBeam, a hybrid ultrasound/IR sensor meant exactly for this kind of purpose. But, as I said IR camera would the trick as well probably. And with that you could even draw or write on a piece of Knäckebröd and the system would still read it!

April 7 2011
Jordi permalink

Really nice setup Mikko. I saw it on @creativeapps timeline and didn’t know it was from our school. Nice surprise. Looking forward to see the code and the video! ;)

April 7 2011
Mikko permalink

The only code is there is no code. I made the first proto in Sikuli, a weird MIT screenshot programming tool -> http://sikuli.org/ and when that proved to be way too slow, I did it in Action(s), a visual desktop automation scripting tool, a bit like AppleScript. It works by capturing what is done with eBeam to it’s own software, does a bunch of macros that convert the image and sends it to (now) Flickr, which then tweets it. It’s a hack and I know it, but it works. Action(s) here -> http://app.jbbres.com/actions/
Hopefully some video tomorrow, but only if my back is better.

April 8 2011
Jordi permalink

Check your email, I’m not sure if I cc you to your good email account. Somebody from Luidia saw it on twitter and want to know more about it. ;)

April 18 2011
Mikko permalink

First test week was a success. It crashed only twice after I debugged the script. First time it did it, because the way it handles the image cache(that needs to be fixed anyway) and the second time, because the computer overheated(a better computer next time).
208 tweets were made. A lot of them were non-sense. Quite a lot of drawings, which is exactly what I hoped. That proves that we only need to make the posts human-readable and none of that complex neural-network ICR stuff. We have survived with just using pen and paper for a long time and reading and writing real handwriting is a good practice anyway.
A lot of people want it back, so I will definitely put it up later somewhere. When and where, I still don’t know.

April 24 2011
rahulsen79 permalink

Great work Mikko!! Cant wait to come play with it in Umeå soon! :)

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