I've learned quite a bit more since my last post. First, I want to just mention how cool it is that Raspberry Pi uses Duck Duck Go for searches. I just started using Duck a few months ago because I was sick of everyone using my info for marketing, and just wanted to have a little privacy. Who knew Pi had a partnership there? Go open source! Okay, back to the project... so, I decided that it was too much trouble to keep unhooking the keyboard on my computer for the Pi, so I visited a nearby computer recycling center and got myself a compact USB keyboard for $1. Works for me. Next on the list was figuring out what the mysterious connector was in the Adafruit Pi accessory pack. It ends up it was part of the Pi Cobbler set. Basically this PCB gives you access to the Pi pins on a breadboard (and they are labeled as well). So, no more counting pins to figure out which one is which on the Pi. You just plug one end of the ribbon cable into the Pi and the other end on the connector at the breadboard. It's definitely a tidy way to handle all those connections. You can see that I had the cute red LED hooked up here.
It was time for some fun. I found a tutorial for a Twitter monitor online, so I pasted the code in Idle, the Python editor. However, the code was not working properly. I noticed that it called for the incorrect pin number for the LED compared to the diagram. So, I tweaked that only to still have errors. Finally, I thought it wasn't happy about the order of how things occurred in the program, so I tried switching some setup information around. Granted this took a few hours to figure out, but I finally got it working! The next step was to try plugging in some fun Valentine style searches. Here's my first attempt.
Some of the searches I tried included "love", "I love you", "I love", and "ILU" -- the results were pretty hysterical. Someone posted how much they love someone based on the fact that they both hate dogs, others posted their affections for sports teams, many were trading their love for a follow from Justin Bieber, and quite a few of them looked a lot like this "*F!&%$#". Needless to say, this really wasn't what I had in mind for my Valentine's project. Luckily, amongst the trash I found @LoveQuotes. This is a fairly tasteful collection of classical and more practical modern quotes. Of course on Twitter you can never be sure, but so far I'm sticking with it. Yeah, yeah, Twitter monitors have been done, but this one will have a special redeeming quality. Just give me some time. Oh yes, concerning the heart box, even with the new white paint, I'm still not happy. I can still see the tiniest of brush marks and that isn't going to do. I'm going to do what others have suggested and go for the spray paint. Off again to the art store!
