This 3D-printed, Arduino-powered lamp changes colors to match the mood of Denver.
Many people consider New York to be a busy metropolis filled with irritable and angry people. On the other hard, others find Los Angeles to be more laid-back. New Orleans, well several folks would say it’s rather festive and jovial. However, the mood of a place like Denver, Colorado is a bit harder to classify. That’s why Maker Chadwick Friedman has created a 3D-printed Twitter Mood Lamp that, as its name would imply, changes colors to match the attitude of the city.
Inspired by those mood rings from the ’70, Friedman decided to build a lamp that would actively respond to Twitter trends. The project itself is controlled by an Arduino Yún (ATmega32U4), which causes the device to emit either red, green, or blue based on whether the mood of the city is perceived to be angry, happy, or sad, respectively. The Maker employed the help of Temboo to capture and analyze the sentiment of Denver by searching for specific keywords that might indicate the emotional state of users via the Twitter API.
In order to limit this project to Denver, the Maker used the city’s latitude and longitude to restrict retrieved tweets to within a 12-mile radius. Friedman adds, “As they’re retrieved, these tweets are outputted onto the Arduino Yun’s serial monitor as well as classified under an emotional state. A running tally is kept of the mood and the lamp glows the color associated with the predominant mood. If its intended use is for an extended period of time, the tally can be enabled to forget tweets retrieved longer than an hour ago. Alternatively, it can scrape twitter at specified intervals and glow the mood associated with tweets only made it in that duration.”
Keep in mind, this isn’t the first time a Maker has creatively displayed the emotions of his or her area based on its social media users. In fact, one Maker recently illuminated the snow on his frontyard to reflect his town’s current mood, while a group of design students devised an interactive installation that literally painted the mood of their city. Intrigued by this IKEA-like, interactive lamp? You’ll want to watch it in action below!