In an amazing coincidence, Twitter changed the JSON datafeeds the #twatch uses to grab the latest trending topics and tweets on the same night that we launched. They didn’t actually make significant changes, but they tweaked the order of variables in a way that confused the #twatch.
{“text”:”
The original search parser looked for the complete tag shown above, then slurped up the tweet text. Thursday night, Twitter moved the ‘{‘ away from the “text” tag and added some new variables.
“text”:”
We updated the firmware to look for the bare minimum tag shown above. This tag is safer anyways, and won’t be effected by future variable order updates. We upgraded our #twatch and it worked fine, the updated firmware will be included in the #twatches shipped by Seeed Studio.
You can buy a #twatch, starting at $30, shipped.
I was wondering if there would be some way to get the twatch to show a specific keyword, like searching for a mention of a username or hashtag? Perhaps a little web server on the twatch could accept those tweaks at runtime so you wouldn’t have to rewrite the flash to change them?
Sure, that’s possible. The big issue is the limited number of program cycles (100) on the 18F67J60 chip. The best solution is to use a small external EEPROM to store that kind of info, it can be written millions of times.
That would make sense… looking at the code, I might do a variant on the port 1337 code that reads keywords off a different port and adds them to the list. I don’t mind having to resend that data after a reset, and it avoids the need to add more components to the PC board. It would also let you reset the list easily so you can toggle through various search terms as the day goes on.
I think that’s a great idea, a config program on a local PC could detect the announce packets at restart and then send the configuration info.