Embedding tweet commands into a device

I was talking to a friend of mine and he pointed out that an acquaintance of ours was at it again. He has an arduino that dispenses candy when you send a tweet command to it. I thought that that sounded interesting so I looked into it. I found a few references to this process on the net. One article in particular caught my eye. This article Tweet-a-pot talked about using Python and a tweet library to do this. I looked into it and found that the instructions fit Linux more than windows. I went through the instructions and converted them to Windows.

Python will run on Windows and it seems that the libraries are compatible between Linux and Windows. I was able to use the same libraries or modules that was used on Linux. I started by following the instructions in Tweet-a-pot. I ran into a few gotchas along the way.

Step #1 is to download python for windows. I went to this site to do that. I download version 2.7.3 as it looked to be more compatible with various components. I also downloaded the 32 bit version even though I’m running Win 7 64 bit. I installed that.

Step #2 is to download python setup tools from this site. I download version setuptools-0.6c11.win32-py2.7.exe. This should match the version you downloaded above. Make sure that it is for the 32 bit version. Now install that.

Step #3 is to download the twitter library for python. There are a couple of them out there so make sure you get the right version which is python-twitter. I got my version here. The current version as of this writing is 0.8.2.

NOTE: make sure that python is in your path then open up a command prompt. From the command prompt you can run scripts by simply typing ptyhon “script name”. To install scripts type python setup.py install. That should install the script.