Description

In this project we created an mBed GPS system that tweets the device's GPS coordinates every five minutes. This project required setting up several components on the mBed to work properly:

• BR355 GPS Device using an RS232 serial interface
• Built-in mBed Ethernet Interface.
• A Twitter and Supertweet.net Account (acting as a Twitter Proxy).

This device can be very useful, as it can be an embedded device that can be attached to an object or person. The device can notify an object's owner very exactly the object is at any given time, just by looking at the Twitter account.

Connections

You may need to use a gender changer/null modem with the RS-232 connector.

Code

Before using this library, you need to register an account with the SuperTweet API. Then, replace the following line in the code

twitter.basicAuth("username", "password");

with the username and password of your SuperTweet account credentials, not your Twitter account credentials.

Video Example

Problems Encountered

• We originally tried using the native Twitter API using Oauth to post tweets. This proved to be a daunting task, and we had problems with many of the other Oauth libraries for mBed. We ended up resorting to using Supertweet to communicate with Twitter.
• Ethernet setup was a big challenge for us because of certain security restrictions on our network. A future development would be to use a WiFly (802.11) module and make the module more agile.