It’s 2019, and if there’s anything that’s just about unavoidable in life right now, it’s reports of what’s going out on the president’s Twitter feed. Trump’s tweets pretty much generate headlines all by themselves. And frankly, we’re inundated.
If the stream of tweets out of the Oval Office gives you a headache, you’re not alone.
And it led one inventor to tackle the problem with a, shall we say, unique solution: a robotic Trump head that spits out ibuprofen every time the president tweets.
Paul Spelman’s creation didn’t start out to be quite so head-turning.
It was more of a way for him to put some of his skills into practice. “I’ve been learning how to code and I wanted to build a project to practice what I’d learned and pick up some new skills,” he told the Daily Dot . “I wanted to build something fun that would hopefully give people a bit of a laugh, and also make a point about the current president’s unusual approach to running the country.”
Well, mission accomplished, you could say.
Paul decided to break down his creation on Reddit , explaining how it works: “The Javascript code continuously checks @realDonaldTrump for new tweets. As soon as a new tweet appears, the Arduino stepper motor turns 360 degrees, dispensing a pill which falls out of the mouth and into the bowl.”
And it doesn’t sound like a terribly expensive build.
Paul wrote that he assembled the Trump head from mostly spare parts. “The pill dispenser was made from an old protein powder tub, plastic sheets, a funnel, and a bunch of duct tape. The rubber mask is from Amazon.”
Needless to say, the folks on Reddit didn’t limit the discussion to merely technical matters.
Moderators had to get involved after things got a little too dicey. “Gonna lock this thread because Trump supporters are the worst people in the world,” wrote one moderator. It also led to the creation of a new rule: “All posts to r/webdev MUST be directly related to web development. Posts which are directly political, or are designed to incite political discord, will be removed,” wrote another moderator.
Meanwhile, some others in the thread had some other ideas for Paul’s creation.
“I love the idea of triggering things when Trump tweets,” wrote one person. “What if every time trump tweets, it automatically extracts 5 cents (or however much you please/can afford) from your bank account and donates it to the NAACP, pro-immigrant orgs or a democratic candidate of one’s choice, etc. If that became a trend, you’d see thousands of dollars going towards his ‘enemies’ every time he tweets.”
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And several others saw it as a useful exercise in learning about coding.
“That’s super fantastic, as a beginner in programming, you opened up a completely new window for me,” one person wrote . “I never thought that JS could be used to control hardwares. Saving it for future.”
Just in case you want to make your own, the instructions are out there.
Paul posted a video of the robotic Trump head in action on YouTube (see below), and posted the code he wrote for it on GitHub . And if you’d rather it dispensed M&Ms instead of ibuprofen, that’s up to you!
h/t: The Daily Dot
