As weird as this may sound, you can now taste your tweets with the help of this Arduino-powered machine. The Data Cocktail is an intricate system of machinery and algorithms that creates drinks based on your most recent Twitter updates. The device operates by searching for the five latest tweets with keywords linked to certain colours and then uses the assigned ingredient to create a cocktail. You can customize what spirit or ingredient that is assigned to each colour.
The project by Clément Gault and Koi Koi Design is said to have a theme that focuses around the “tangible representation of data through our senses of sight”.
“Data Cocktail not only provides a unique kind of drink, but it also prints the cocktail’s recipe along with the corresponding tweets. A gift you can take away,” Gault explains on the Data Cocktail website.
The two ingredients for making the perfect cocktail are processing and Arduino programming languages. For every bulb attached to the system there is a different ingredient. When a post is recognized for featuring one of the specific colours, the machine uses the ingredient of that colour as a dose in the cocktail.
The pouring and mixing of each beverage is done through Twitter4J library, the unofficial Java library for the Twitter API. A first application, developed in Processing, pilots the device. Data is sent through the Twitter4J library to see if any words match with the cocktail ingredients. As it controls the device, the application processes the data.
Currently, Data Cocktail uses six different ingredients that match six different Twitter requests, but Gault shares that the device has the potential to do more. Every cocktail consists of 5 doses, but this can easily be changed with the push of a button. It is even much faster to get a drink this way rather than from your favourite bar as the machine only takes about a minute to make. Words, hashtags and mentions are recognized by the system
“The system will accept either words (e.g. chocolate or rabbit), hashtags (e.g. #COP21 or #res2016) or also mentions (e.g. @fhollande or @Cointreau),” the Data Cocktail’s website continued.
