UNDER THE WEATHER? visualizing reactions to the weather on twitter INTRODUCTION Weather is the most immediate way in which we interact with the environment. We can’t help but be affected by it. It’s one of the first topics we reach for when we’re making small talk or idly posting to Twitter. But as we know, people’s perception of the weather is highly subjective: we’ve probably all overheard, or even participated in, a lighthearted debate over whether or not 50˚F is “freezing cold” or “t-shirt weather.” Under the Weather? is a Processing app that juxtaposes positive and negative reactions to the weather for a particular city. When the program is run, the user is presented with a choice of four cities across the U.S. City selections are made by pressing a switch connected to the installation. Selecting a city will display a screen split horizontally into three sections: the top section displays the number of positive remarks about the weather made by people in that city, the middle section displays the current weather in the city, and the bottom section displays the number of negative comments.

IMPLEMENTATION Weather data from four cities will be collected in a Processing sketch using the Weather Underground API. Tweets will be collected from Twitter’s Search API, which includes tools to search public tweets specifying parameters such as location, positive tone, and negative tone. Buttons or switches connected via Arduino will allow the user to select the city for which they wish to see data. Weather data will be displayed in the center with the city, date, temperature, type of weather, and additional information. The top and bottom sections contain glyphs that represent the number of tweets expressing positive or negative sentiments about the weather. Each glyph will represent one tweet. Twitter data will be limited to the past 6 hours. Appendix A: Hardware Button Pad 2x2 - LED Compatible http://www.sparkfun.com/products/7836 Button Pad 2x2 - Breakout PCB http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9277 Button Pad 2x2 Bottom Bezel http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8747 Appendix B: Software Libraries HTTP Library for Processing http://francisli.github.com/processing-http/ Weather Underground API http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/ We Feel Fine API http://wefeelfine.org/api.html Appendix C: Sample Code & Tutorials Twitter API: Search by time http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6819211/twitter-search-api-searching-by-time Using the Twitter Search API https://dev.twitter.com/docs/using-search Your Random Numbers - Getting Started with Processing and Data Visualization http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/your-random-numbers-getting-started-with-processing-and-data-visualization Using SparkFun’s 2x2 RGB LED Button Pad with an Arduino http://www.aarongoselin.com/active-posts/28-using-sparkfuns-2x2-rgb-led-button-pad-with-an-arduino

So here's the splash screen for my final submission. I'll post a video later this afternoon.

Like it says on the screen, it displays weather data for one of four predefined U.S. cities at a time depending on button input. Four push buttons were connected via Arduino, each corresponding to a single city. I had intended to include positive and negative reactions to local weather conditions based on Twitter posts, but I wasn't able to get Twitter and Wunderground working together even after creating a Tweet class to keep the API calls separate. It's very likely that I just don't know what I'm doing when it comes to writing classes, though.

I got to this point with the Twitter glyphs without the Tweet class: http://ccaweather.tumblr.com/post/14144364198/above-image-is-the-result-of-the-following-code

And go here to see the class I attempted to write: https://gist.github.com/1483478

I also ended up changing the Arduino code to send a single character on each button press, instead of the full city name or even the three-letter airport codes. Processing wasn't consistently reading the entire string on a single line, and consequently the button presses didn't always work. It's not an ideal solution. It might be better to do something similar to the VirtualColorMixer example on the Arduino website, which essentially has Processing read comma-separated values. I wonder if debouncing the button input would also be helpful.

Thanks for your advice, Francis! My buttons are now controlling the weather (data)!

Code:

But what happens with the code above is that this comes up:

and then it's quickly replaced by this:

The arrays are being filled with 200 items because that's how I initialized them, then replaced with the 15 items returned by the Twitter search once that call is actually made. So I need to instantiate my arrays after the responseReceived method is invoked, but simply moving those lines of code into the responseReceived or draw methods isn't working.

Got it to display data from 4 cities. I'm sure there's a less stupid/more elegant way to do this, but it works...sort of. I've run it 6 times and have gotten a NullPointerException twice, but maybe it's because I'm making API calls too close together? (Yeah, I'm totally pulling that out my ass. I don't actually know why it's only working 2/3 of the time.)