I bought an arduino kit from oomlout which contained a motor, servo and other bits and bobs.
Using the kit I upgraded the cycling indicator (see previous post) so that, as well as a light being turned on when the account being monitored sends a ‘Mike is cycling’ tweet, a motor is activated. The motor drives a Lego model cyclist until a ‘Mike is not cycling’ is sent.
The motor bit was easy – the oomlout kit contained a cut out template that could be placed on the breadboard showing the wiring. The motor is attached to a digital pin and is activated by writing HIGH and deactivated by writing LOW to the pin. To be honest the arduino stuff was the easiest part – it was the Lego I struggled with! Trying to build the model so that it didn’t have too much friction between all the parts. Anyway the result is shown below…