Twitter Belt 1.0
If you know anything about conveyor belts powered by tweets, you know more than I did.
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But that was the idea, and it was up to me to make it happen.
How it worked:
8 hour live stream event
A tweet @WellsFargo with #GetCollegeReady would move a prize along a track
Student whose tweet caused prize to fall off the conveyor belt wins.
The main challenge was that I had no idea how to do anything that was required to pull this off.
But I love puzzles, electronics, and building things, so it was just a matter of time.
TIMELINE:
I had 2 months and all I needed to do was build a conveyor belt and hook it up to Twitter's streaming API. Okay, sure.
CHALLENGE 1 – BUILD A CONVEYOR BELT
I weighed my options. I studied conveyor belts. Motors, idlers, drive pulleys, take-up pulleys, belt materials, and slider bed materials.
RESULTS:
Nope.
2 months was not enough time to become a conveyor belt technician.
So I cold-called every conveyor belt manufacturer in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. Then expanded the search. A company based out of Bloomfield, CT called MK North America could help. They built the mechanical workings of the belt — according to my specs — and I was able to focus my time on the code and electronics that spoke two languages: Python and Conveyor Belt (aka 24V electronic pulses).
CHALLENGE 2 – LIVE STREAMING THE EVENT
There were a LOT of requests about how the event needed to be aired.
RESULTS:
Creative Director: Just give it to the in-house video guy to figure out.
Me: Crap. That’s me.
They wanted:
• Picture-in-picture
• On-screen graphics
• Cut to beauty shots of each prize/backpack
• Cut between 2 different camera angles
I needed to:
• Create an interface to control what we saw and what was being aired — Teradek's VidiU encoders and Live:Air app were phenomenal.
• Find cameras that were compatible with live streaming (my DSLRs were not) — A solid day of research with my team (me, myself, and I).
RESULTS:
We crushed it.
Tweets: 90,000
Impressions: Over 9 million
All nighters: 5