Twittering Appliances

As Twitter's use has exploded around the world, it is not only humans taking part. A washing machine, toilet, toaster and home light and temperature sensors have joined the growing list of personal updates streamed over cyberspace.

With the help of microcontrollers, wires and Arduino boards, these household appliances have been rigged to answer Twitter's basic questions: 'What are you doing?'

The twittering toilet, @hacklab.toilet has more than 800 followers and the twittering toaster (@mytoaster), whose tweets alternate between 'toasting' and 'toast is done' has around 360 followers. The washing machine - @pimpy3wash - has over 500 followers even though its posts don't vary beyond 'a load of washing finished at...'

Seth Hardy, a researcher for an anti-virus company, modified his toilet to tweet as a joke to begin with but now thinks its fun. "I didn't like Twitter much and think everyone puts up very mundane stuff on Twitter. I thought 'why not have my toilet in there too?'

Matthew Morey, an engineer at Texas Instruments, was inspired to find a way to get the temperature and lighting of his family home in Houston on Twitter  after reading a 'guide to creating the twittering toaster' found on Instructables, a website with instructions on how to complete DIY projects. A typical post from the sensors reads: Temperature = 82.5F / Ambient Light = 901.

Morey can also send commands to his appliances via Twitter. Doing that is as easy as sending a reply with words such as '@MattsOffice light on' or '@MattsOffice light off' to turn on or off the light at his desk. These outputs from the light and temperature sensors could have well gone into a email alert or database, says Morey, but tweeting is a lot more fun.

Hooking up home appliances is part joke, part experiment, but it does illustrate the larger trend of home automation that is catching on among do-it-yourselfers.