A little about you and your background
I live in Cumbria with my wife and 5 year old
daughter - I work as a Web Development Manager and my background is in IT and
web solutions development.
Where did the idea come from?
I'd always loved the rich mahogany and brass
look of old ticker tape machines and thought it would be lovely to have one to
sit on my desk at work as a design piece. Of course they're antiques now - very
rare and very expensive and it struck me that even if I did manage to get a
machine, it would just sit there doing nothing, gathering dust. With telegraph
lines long silent, if I wanted a functional version I'd have to build my own
version and think of a modern data source I could hook into - of course
Twitter fits the bill perfectly, with short messages of no more than 140
characters.
Why did you decide to build it, your intentions?
When I first pitched the initial idea to friends
and family it's fair to say everyone was fairly sceptical! I was sure I
had something though and the idea just wouldn't go away, so I set about
building a proof of concept prototype.
The initial intention was simply to build
something for my own use, but I posted some photos of the finished machine on
the internet and the response was just phenomenal. I was really taken aback by
the wonderful feedback, thousands of positive tweets, the press interest and
the constant stream of lovely emails from people - it has been an incredible
experience.
What does it do?
The Twittertape Machine is a stand-alone device
that connects to the internet every 30 seconds and prints a tickertape-style
feed of your tweets, mentions and replies on Twitter.
How does it work?
The brains of the machine are hidden in the base,
it contains a network-enabled microcontroller and a tiny thermal printer that
prints onto standard BPA-Free thermal paper like a standard grocery receipt.
This means that it doesn't need to be connected to a computer to function and
as the printer is thermal it doesn't use ink, so no expensive ink refills. You
can also get multiple spools of tickertape-sized paper rolls from a single
receipt paper roll, so it's really economical to run.
A little about the manufacturing process.
I had a very clear vision in my head of how I
wanted the finished piece to look, but I'd never built anything before so the
manufacturing process was a learning process from start to finish! I bought and
dismantled lots of old clock movements until I found pieces I thought I could
work with and then spent many late nights cobbling everything together through
trial and error until it felt right.
What’s next?
Good question! A huge part of the response was
that people really want a Tickertape Machine of their own, so it would be
lovely to do a production run at some stage. I've also got a couple of other
ideas that I'd like to bring to life so watch this space!
The Twittertape machine is exhibited at the Globe Gallery as part of Northern Design Festival. The full programme is here.
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