Martin sent us this fun project called TweetSweets, inspired by Labby’s twitter-enabled candy machine

How does it work? Easily explained:

– User1 sends a tweet with #givejacksweets
• Processing searches for the hashtag, sends a tweet thanking them and passes ‘sweets’ to Arduino
• Arduino activates sweet dispenser for 0.5 seconds
• Photoresistor detects when User2 collects them, and passes to Processing
• Processing takes a photo of User2 and tweets this to the User1
• User1 and User2 both smile :)

I’ve also cobbled together bits of code from other sources, including:

• a bit of Scott Fitzgerald’s PhotoResistor code from the Arduino Starter Kit book
• Twitter Processing sketch based on RobotGrrl ‘Just a simple Processing and Twitter thingy majiggy‘ that I used for ‘I Am Iron Man’
• Webcam code from Samuel Cox’s WeddingBooth
• Yonas Sandbak’s PostToWeb class

Funny thing is that this project didn’t start out involving sweets at all. Originally, I had planned to use NFC cards to allow people to quickly tap in, have a picture taken and then manipulate that image once it was on the server. Somewhere along the line I must have gotten hungry!