As I already mentioned in a previous post, I recently purchased a 4 line LCD display to play around with. It provides an I2C Bus which means that it can be connected to your Arduino or similar microcontroller with only two wires.

I could’ve come up with a thousands things to do with this display: using it for showing notifications, as an RSS scroller or as a hardware dashboard with temperatures and statistics. Then I remembered a project I came across once, where someone was using an Arduino and a LCD displaying his twitter feed.

The Backend

Although I’m sure there are multiple scripts out there for fetching tweets and sending them to the serial port, I decided to write my own back-end. Not only will this give me more freedom, it also allows me to get acquainted with the RXTX library. Undoubtedly, this will come in handy when I set my mind on some other application for the display.

The Microcontroller

Because I2C displays are well supported on the Arduino platform, I decided to stick with it. Except for some trouble with the way continuous text is displayed, everything worked as expected.

Below is a picture of the end results. I’ve mounted the display of the outside of the enclosure with the controller, the wiring and the Arduino on the inside.

Display inside it’s casing

EDIT: I’ve extended the back-end to provicde a graphical user interfance and support different modules. Currently there’s a Twitter and Reddit module.

All source code for my Arduino Twitter Display is available on Github