Shrimp and Raspberry Pi run the Morse Twitter Display

Yesterday I outlined my plans for a Morse Twitter display.

Tworse (the Twitter Morse Code display) is now running on the Shrimp + Pi as well as on an Arduino + Pi.

The Raspberry Pi monitors a twitter stream - in this case, it's looking for  tweets with the hashtag #morsetweeter.

It converts each tweet to upper case, removes any non-ascii characters, and sends it over a serial link to the Arduino or Shrimp.

The Shrimp reads lines using the Serial interface and flashes them in Morse Code. It then sends a text version of the Morse-coded line back to the Pi which displays it on the console.

Running the app on the Pi

The sketch for the Shrimp and the Python Script for the Pi are now on github.

The sketch is  a bit long for a blog post, but here is the Python code on the Pi.

import time
from twython import Twython
import serial


def parse(filename, comment_char='#', separator='='):
    options = {}
    with open(filename) as f:
        for line in f:
            start = line.split(comment_char)[0]
            if separator in start:
                option, value = map(lambda x: x.strip(),

                     start.split(separator, 1))
                options[option] = value
    return options


class ArduinoSerial():
    def __init__(self):
        self.ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyACM0', 9600)

    def send(self, text):
        self.ser.write(self.ascii_only(text))

    def receive(self):
        return self.ser.readline()

    @staticmethod    def ascii_only(text):
        return ''.join(i for i in text if ord(i)<128)


def get_twitter():
    ini = parse('secrets/twitter.ini')
    key = ini['KEY']
    secret = ini['SECRET']
    tw = Twython(key, secret, oauth_version=2)
    return Twython(key, access_token=tw.obtain_access_token())


if __name__ == '__main__':
    arduino = ArduinoSerial()
    time.sleep(1.0)
    twitter = get_twitter()
    tweets = twitter.search(q='#morsetweeter')
    for status in tweets['statuses']:
        line = (status['text']).upper()+'\n'        print line,
        arduino.send(line)
        print arduino.receive(),