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).


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RESULTS:

We crushed it.

Tweets: 90,000
Impressions: Over 9 million
All nighters: 5