Tweet Monkey is a hilariously simple maker project.

Many of the maker projects you'll find online are intended to flex the muscles of a given maker or technology and end up being rather complicated and difficult to replicate.

Tweet Monkey is an attempt to create a project that crosses a number of maker disciplines while remaining conceptually simple. It's easy to acquire the needed materials, and hopefully when you've built a Tweet Monkey, you'll have a good grasp on a number of concepts.

Tweet Monkey monitors Twitter for tweets that contain the hashtag #tweetmonkey. When someone (anyone in the world) tweets with #tweetmonkey, your Tweet Monkey will animate (clang his symbols, nod his head, and squawk) for a couple of seconds.

This project takes advantage of Node.js which makes accessing Twitter a breeze. It's designed such that the work of looking for tweets is offloaded to Twitter - afterall, they know quite well how to search for tweets and they have a few servers to do the work. Tweet Monkey just hangs out waiting for Twitter to push down notification.

The entirety of the code for Tweet Monkey easily fits on a single page. It's very short. I like short code that expresses the essence of what I'm trying to do.

I encourage you to make a Tweet Monkey yourself. The effort is small and you'll get a fun introduction to maker projects that use software and electronics together.

Read the docs to get started.