Wotcher @recantha here’s your pic. pic.twitter.com/U7rJmJGUKM
— Neon Clock Tweet Bot (@NixieBot) December 1, 2016
Robin Bussell has created a Nixie Tube clock that listens out for a Twitter hashtag (#NixieBotShowMe) and then displays the tweet text on the tubes. It then uses a Raspberry Pi to take photographs of the message, bundle them up into an animated gif if necessary and tweets it back at you. As you can see above, it doesn’t quite handle long messages, but it’s still pretty cool! You can read more about the project over at Hackaday.io.
Nixiebot was only originally meant to display single words (the word after the hashtag in the tweet) but users quickly caught on that using:a:non:displayable:character:as:padding:worked:to:produce:phrases as the very simple parser considered it one word or “group of characters bounded by whitespace”. The only message limit is due to file upload size limits and kicks in at about 100 characters.
Thanks for the write up!