TweetMachine

Read this post to understand what Tweetmachine is.

The following paragraph describes software setup.

Step by step guide

This guide assumes you're using a Debian-like distribution (e.g., Raspbian). However, it should be easily adaptable for other Linux distributions.

This guide also assumes that the current working directory is your home (~). If you're using a different directory, please adapt some of the following commands.

• Install git

    sudo apt-get install git 
  

• Install i2c-tools (useful, for instance, to run i2cdetect) and the I2C development library (needed by wiringPi at build time)

    sudo apt-get install i2c-tools libi2c-dev
  

• Edit the kernel modules

    sudo nano /etc/modules
  

  Paste these lines at the end of the file

    i2c-bcm2708 
    i2c-dev
  

• Edit /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf

    sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf
  

  and comment the two following lines:

    # blacklist spi-bcm2708
    # blacklist i2c-bcm2708
  

• Edit /boot/config.txt

    sudo nano /boot/config.tx
  

  Paste these lines at the end of the file

    dtparam=i2c1=on
    dtparam=i2c_arm=on
  

• Reboot (kernel should now load i2c modules by default at startup)

    sudo reboot
  

• Download wiringPi library and tweetmachine software

    git clone git://git.drogon.net/wiringPi
    git clone https://github.com/lucach/tweetmachine
  

• Apply a custom patch to wiringPi library

    cd ~/wiringPi
    git apply ~/tweetmachine/0001-Add-wiringPiI2CWriteBlock-function.patch
  

• Build wiringPi

    ./build
  

• Install python2 and tweepy

    sudo apt-get install python2.7 python-pip
    sudo pip install tweepy
  

• Build tweetmachine software

    cd ~/tweetmachine
    ./build
  

• Inside download.py change these values with your Twitter Developers app keys:

  • CONSUMER_KEY
  • CONSUMER_SECRET
  • ACCESS_TOKEN
  • ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET

  Be careful and double check the keys you've inserted. A single wrong character is enough to break the whole application.

• Inside download.py change the HASHTAG you want to follow. Here you can customize other parameters (such as the number of tweets retrieved each time and the name of the output file).

• Start download.py in background. The easiest (but not very flexible) way:

    ./download.py &
  

• Start program (which reads a file and sends data to the Flashmat matrices)

    ./program 1 output.txt