Tweeting Toilets

An Arduino Computer

It always continues to amaze me what people do with their time and resources. 

In the early 1980's there was a Coke machine in the Computer Science department.  Enterprising engineering students discovered a spare Ethernet controller and were able to build an Ethernet interface into the Coke machine.

I worked a job with a guy who had went to school there and the company we worked for had close ties to CMU as well - we often found ourselves over there for work. 

"Want something to drink from the machine?" he asked on day.

"Sure..." I said.


"One second," he said as he brought up the piece of software to interrogate the machine and see what was in it.  No need to leave our seats.  No need to get our hopes up if what we wanted was sold out.


That was about thirty years ago.  Little did I realize that I was witnessing the future.


Today I find this: a Toaster that Tweets...


The guy looks like some kind of hardware hacker with too much time on his hands though on his blog the creator of the Tweeting toaster says it has 600+ followers.  That's probably 600 people with the most interesting lives imaginable...

But not as interesting as the 800+ people following the Tweeting toilet or the 660 people following the Tweeting washing machine.

Now I get there are technological reasons for wanting to create this kind of thing - who wouldn't want to be to be able to check from Florida that their furnace was still working in mid-winter. 

Whatever you think of these Tweeting wonders the technology behind them is also interesting.

Many of these projects are built with something called an Arduino.  This is a small computer - complete with internet access that you can wire up to virtually anything.  It has extra input and output ports so you can connect things to it - like switches to tell whether or not the door is open, etc.

The Arduino is very popular and there is a lot of free software out there for it - including a Twitter software library that lets it post to its own Twitter account.

Really, you have to wonder where this will go.  On the one hand how many people really need a Tweeting lawnmower?   But imagine if your local convenience store could Tweet about its low gas prices...  Or when the fresh supply of donuts just got delivered.

On the corporate level ADT (or whatever they're called now) sells a home security system with many of these ideas.  You see it on TV: Mom, from her smart phone, can view the front door from work and see the kiddies getting home from school.  Dad can turn down the temperature on the thermostat from work.

(Let's just hope mom isn't driving when the naughty kiddies turn up on the video monitor with a crack pipe...)

Think of the possibilities...