Some days ago, I found several websites mentioning the possibility to use Arduino microcontroller to drive a LCD display to show Facebook and Twitter updates, or the like. I considered this a good idea, but in almost all the solutions, updates are read from a PC and then fed to the Arduino via serial connection. I only found a stand-alone RSS reader without PC available, but I couldn't make it work.
Therefore, I thought: "It would be great to make a twitter LCD displayer without the need for a PC, so that it possible to build it and use it in complete freedom!". And I started tinkering... and checking on the Arduino website for the available libraries.
The solution that I designed is the following: to use Arduino + Ethernet Shield as the basic platform, and a LCD display as output. Arduino libraries provided me what I needed: Ethernet libraries would enable me to connect to Twitter website and download the RSS feed of a user, TextFinder libraries would enable be to conveniently locate the tag of the most recent tweet, and LCD libraries to drive the LCD. Between yesterday and tonight, I developed a simple proof of concept, finding worst difficulties in having a reasonable output on the LCD, but now everything is working!
In the next posts I'll provide further information, schematics and the code; for the time being I'm not using DNS, displaying the last tweet only and the code needs some polishing - but the system works impressively well... and WITHOUT PC!!!
