Meet Eko, the Fimo Clay Python Twitter bot
- 30th June 2016
- Blog
- 2:01 reading time (ish)
- 384 words
Eko is a wireless, battery powered, 8-inch Twitter robot who can read out any tweet that contains the hashtag ekobot.
This is an idea that I instantly fell in love with when I came across the guys over at Paper Leaf and their twitter bot, Hugo. So this isn’t a new idea by all means, but definitely a learning curve and experience that I wanted to try out to have a break from front-end coding.
The first hurdle was looking into how I could convert text into speech, admittedly, the first thought was ‘How the hell?!’ but Google is a wonderful thing and I quickly learnt about Festival TTS. Next task was working out how to retrieve tweets under a certain criteria – Thank you Twitter API and a little bit of Python! I won’t go into the ins and outs of the Python script but suffice to say, it works (with some help).
With the script working, I decided to go down the self contained route, just like Hugo, so I ordered myself an Anker PowerCore+ 13400 battery, found my old Wireless WiFi Dongle and opted to use some Fimo clay (3D printing was an option, but considering this is suppose to be a ‘fun’ project, I decided to limit the cost).
So what’s Eko built from? Break it down for me please? Sure thing!
- Raspberry Pi 2
- Python Script
- Anker PowerCore+ 13400 Battery
- XMI X-Mini II Speaker
- Generic Wireless Dongle
- 3 1/2 Packets of Fimo Polymer Clay
- Some Acrylic Paint I had lying about
He’s still finding his voice and undergoing some casual maintenance but I see no reason why he can’t remain awake for as long as possible! Please feel free to try it out (For now I’ll simply reply to him, I may try out a timelapse of his expected nonsense at a later date though). So go ahead, tweet away! For example, if you tweet “Stop drinking so much tea and get back to web design! #ekobot”, Eko will wake up and say, “Stop drinking so much tea and get back to web design!”
Once again, thank you to the guys over at Paper Leaf and thank you to those who have helped with the Python side of things! Don’t forget to try Eko out by tweeting him;