Well, it's official: Either we've jumped the shark, or we have created the hippest dang kegerator on the planet: Kegbot now tweets. (solemn silence). We can safely say that not since Beenz has there been a more important and groundbreaking advance in internet technology!
Although Kegbot has been recording drinks and causing trouble for over 5 years, until recently there was no convenient way to immediately notify your friends (and stalkers) about your drinking habits. These days are over.
We tip our hat (and raise our glass) to a couple of projects that have helped pave the way to our own special brand of irritating microbrew microbanter:
@TweetingBar is the first tweeting keg that we know of, but what we're really impressed by is his sharp tongue.
Wired's @beerrobot sports a paint job that makes our black Haier feel quite beige, and it just got a flowmeter upgrade.
Those wacky guys who dig up and sell all sorts of cool components, SparkFun, just got @SparkFunKeg online. They're also using a very interesting sensor.
You might ask: How is @kegbot anything new, or different from its tweeting brethren? Well, unlike some tweeting kegs, Kegbot is able to personalize its tweet... to the person pouring! (shocked gasps)
And now, for some boring technical details...
The Twitter support was added as an optional drink post-processor in the Kegbot core. During a normal Kegbot pour, users authenticate to the Kegbot to get credit for their drink (via iButton, password, whatever).
After the drink is completed and recorded, an event is passed to the Twitter post-processor, which begins to generate the tweet. The volume of the drink, the permanent drink URL, and the keg name are extracted from the new drink's record.
The volume is compared to a configurable rank of drink sizes (small/average/large), and a smug response is randomly selected. It is the kegbot admin's responsibility to populate the database of smug responses, ranging from petulant and taunting (small drink), to mildly enthusiastic (average drink), to genuinely impressed (large drink) -- at least, as close to those emotions as a bot can get, which (based on your author's attempts) is not very close..
Finally, the post-processor looks up the drinker's Kegbot profile and determines if the twitter name is known. If it is, the tweet is personalized with the drinker's name (eg @mik3y); if not, the Kegbot username is used. The tweet is posted as the configured Twitter account for that Kegbot system.
Now that the basics are in place, there are several more "fun" things we might consider, including:
Tweet as the drinker, so your friends (who are not interested in following your beer bot) can be advised of your habits ("Warning, I'm on my 5th drink; ignore subsequent tweets.")
Tweet keg change events, temperature status, and go into cat-in-heat mode when there has been little activity ("I'm lonely!")
Dump in some temperature sensor readings; Attach pictures from the pours in flight; etc.
You get the idea: it is Twitter, after all; anything and everything must be made to use it... somehow. Here at Kegbot, we're happy to oblige.
