Garduino Upgrade, Now with more Twitter!

Step 7 Update #5: Twitter your Garden

Now you've got your garden all hooked up to your computer and talking wirelessly to the computer.  You may even be recording your data to a file to look at it later.  What you may not be able to do yet is monitor your plants while you're at work.  To do this I employed Twitter, much like the Tweet-a-Watt did.  I signed up for an account that I could use for testing, @chrisgilmertest.  Then I hooked my code into the Python Twitter API, entered my user name and password, and voila!  I was done.

I set up my twitter to send back the readings for the different sensors and the current time.  I know you can track the time you posted, but I wanted the time from my computer.  I also decided to have it tweet every half hour.  When I originally was programming this I had it tweet every 5 minutes, which was good when I wanted to ensure it was actually working, but got annoying to follow pretty quick.  I may actually have it tweet every hour or couple hours in the future.  You get to decide what you want for yourself and go from there.

I have asked friends to help me come up with some silly messages for my garden to tweet, based on the sensor readings, so maybe I'll get some snarky comments up there soon.

You may have noticed that this code was already provided to you earlier in this Instructable.  My hope was that you got excited and already started to play with it.  If not, what are you waiting for?