I’d love to see some Twitter hardware. I know some must be out there, why can’t I find it? I’ve talked before about the idea of a Twitter Sampler. Other options would be twitter on simple displays, and twitter news feeds on your TV. What about the Twitter API?

Twitter is, let’s face it, annoying. So what about making it even more so: a Twitter text to speech machine? One of my talking dolls could spit out my tweets all day and night. Wow, what a headache. But funny!

What about the opposite of the Sampler, where a very large screen aggregates an overwhelming amount of tweets? Like a poster. Could be interesting?

These are all great applications for the aiosphere system:

A Make magazine blog entry shows a nice gizmo that turns on an LED backlight behind a series of little pictures of friends, so the user can see at a glance who’s online. Used VB or similar.

Another Make post, this one about an ambient orb made from an ikea lamp. Notable for use of an Ethernet connection.

Another Arduino ambient orb, this one USB.

Here is video of a news feed scroller which uses a WizNet ethernet chip. Here is a PDF abstract of the project.

Here is a Stock Clock project which uses Zigbee modules, useful for looking at the overall structure of the type of system I am describing.

I don’t know whether a computer can “reach” a gadget on iGoogle.

The basic Gadgets test concept is to make a gadget that gathers (weather or) data and formats it for display on an aio.  Poll this gadget (if possible) from the aio (in the test case represented by my PC).

If it isn’t possible to poll a gadget from another computer, then I could have the gadget periodically write to a text file on my own server.  This text file could be titled 465782ED49009F0B, or whatever the MAC address is of the aio.  The aio could request its own file from the server.  The file would contain only the most recent command, or could be a string of commands.

Next, how would the aio confirm receipt?  I guess by deleting the file, or deleting the contents of the file.

Now, how about if data needs to go the other way?  What if I wanted to make a gadget that passed data between two objects?  Then do files need to have input and output sections?  Or do there need to be two files?

And, is FTP harder than HTTP?

Similar to the Jack In The Box and the Push Puppet aios, this would have a vibrator in it that would pulse (poss. in some pattern), causing the head to waggle. Periodically? Until reset? I have a nice JP Patches bobble head just waiting for some bigger role in life.  I think this would be a very fun project, and very easy if one had easy access to a pager motor (stick it in the head and run wires down the neck).