The Twittering Dehumidifier

Friday, 11th December 2009

It seems like everyone is Twittering these days, with celebs such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and even Barack Obama getting in on the act, its becoming increasingly popular. Twitter is a free to use micro-blogging service which allows you to post 'tweets'. In fact its now so popular that even inanimate household devices such as Ryan's LG dehumidifier are Twittering! So how did Ryan get his dehumidifier hooked up to the Internet and posting on Twitter, and more importantly, why?

The Inspiration

Ryan got the idea from Mark Walling , who as far as we know was the first person in the world to create a Twittering dehumidifier . Ryan decided to take things up a level by monitoring the water level in the collection bucket and posting it to Twitter . So why would you want to do such a thing? I don't know for sure, but I would say why not! I get the impression that Ryan loves a technical challenge and his experiment could form the basis for all sorts of household items Twittering. Today a twittering dehumidifier, tomorrow a Twittering fridge freezer?

The Hardware

My knowledge of electronics is nowhere near that of Ryan, so I'll explain here in simple terms and if you want more techie details then just head on over to Ryans Blog post. Ryan uses a series of capacitors fixed to a piece of wire as a sensor to detect the water levels and then measures the capacitance using an Arduino. Just click on the image to the upper right and look for the next button to see some more images.

The Software

Ryan developed some software to process the data and post it to Twitter, its real techie stuff that goes way over my head but if you're smart and into that kind of thing then Ryan shares the details of the code on his Blog post.

The Results

So assuming that all is well with Ryans LG dehumidifier, you should be able to see its latest Tweets below:

So I wonder if this will start a trend of people hooking up all sorts of strange things to send tweets to Twitter? Finally, I would like to say a big thank you to Ryan for allowing the use of his images on the About Dehumidifiers Blog.