Description: Really random I reckon.
Most of my Arduino projects are, frankly, toys to entertain myself. Nobody needs another digital clock with bright LEDs, but I say “why not?” For this item, I had my original Arduino Leonardo and a Chinese knock-off Ethernet shield. The Ethernet shield is not the most reliable, but this is not safety-critical stuff here, either. It didn’t take much to put together a $3.99 RTC module and a LED dot-matrix display (those moving signs have always mesmerized me).
But it didn’t take too long before seeing the same messages scroll by over and over to get boring. I’d rather something dynamic, like tweets for example. But the Arduino doesn’t seem to have the processing power or code space to access the twitter API directly, especially since it requires SSL. Too bad.
I Internetted a bit and found SuperTweet ( http://www.supertweet.net/ ) that provides a non-SSL interface to twitter, along with handling the OAuth process. I spent a week wrangling the Leonardo/Ethernet connection, but the Arduino-SuperTweet-twitter chain was very fragile and unreliable. Many times I couldn’t tell if the problem was in my interface to SuperTweet, or my credentials, or connection/twitter problems (did I exceed the rate limit?). Part of the problem was undoubtedly my twitter API learning