Twitter Laser Pointer

Overview

First off, I would like to say that this is a project from a long time ago. I made it in seventh grade, and as such I probably won't remember every single detail about the process by which it was made. I think it is a pretty cool project though (and was my first real venture into hardware projects) so I still wanted to write a post on it.

So this is a twitter controlled laser pointer. Essentially, it would listen to a twitter account I made for it, and in the event it got a tweet in the form X[some number] Y[Some Number] it would use the tweet to position the laser pointer.

It was essentially a twitterbot that talked to an Arduino.

You can find the code here.

How I Made It

So I first watched a few tutorials (which can be found in the README.md file on the Github repo).

Then, using both the Twit and Serialport library for JavaScript, I built the twitterbot, which would just send any coordinates received to the Arduino.

After that I wrote the arduino code, which parsed the coordinates it received and positioned the laser pointer (which was controlled by some servos) accordingly.

What I Learned

This project was the one that sparked my love for programming and making things with hardware. It was the first time I built something other than just a blinky light or something similar, and it showed me that I could actually make cool stuff using technology.

On the more technical side, during this project I learned how serial communications worked, how twitterbots worked in general (and how to implement them), and how to parse data in C++, all of which are fairly useful skills.