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.
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