Twitter printer

During the Palomar5 camp we were asked to create a low-budget installation that would add an interactive element to the camp and the closing conference. We set out and bought the oldest matrix printer we could get our hands on and hacked together a way to print out tweets that have a #p5 or #palomar5 hash tag. For the Palomar5 website we already had a bot crawling Twitter activity on #p5 and #palomar5, which we saved to a database. This turned out to be perfect for our Twitter printer, since we could ping the database for changes and print out the newest tweets. We’ll publish the source code for this later.

The cool thing about a matrix printer is that its paper supply is basically an endless roll of paper. Because of this the printer would just keep on printing 24/7 without having to insert new paper. After the Palomar5 project we used the printer on other conferences as an alternative for a backchannel.