I was thinking to make a Desk Notifier which will notify me about my new email, Facebook & Twitter notification and finally I made it. I used the coolest single board computer Raspberry Pi to bring the thing in reality. This Desk Notifier will notify you about your new Gmail, Facebook notification and will show you the total number of new emails, total number of likes of your Facebook page, total number of notifications of your Facebook account and number of your Twitter followers. You can easily modify it to show others information such as number of tweets, number of friend requests, number of messages etc. I used only two seven segment for each information to show and for that it can show maximum 99 notifications. You can easily extend it if you like.
Components:
- Raspberry Pi (Dexter Industries) (Gearbest)
- SD Card with Raspbian operating system (Dexter Industries)
- Raspberry Pi WiFi Adapter (Dexter Industries)
- Raspberry Pi Power Supply (Dexter Industries)
- MAX7219CNG LED Driver IC (Sparkfun)
- Seven Segment Display (Common cathode- 8pcs)
- LED (5pcs)
- Resistor (10k- 1pc, 220ohm – 5pcs)
- PCB Board (8″ x 4″)
- PVC Board (12″ x 10″)
Tools:
- PCB Drill
- Soldering Iron
- Hot Glue Gun
- Scale
- Jumper Wire
- Wire Cuttero get started with Raspberry Pi you need an operating system. NOOBS (New Out Of the Box Software) is an easy operating system install manager for the Raspberry Pi. If you already bought a sd card with pre-installed operating system then just escape this step. If not follow NOOBS SETUP guide. You can follow the video from Raspberry Pi Foundation.For more:
Instructables: All-in-One Raspberry Pi Getting Started Guide
Instructables:Getting started with Raspberry PI
You need to download and install few things in order for Python to be able to properly check your Gmail inbox and show the number of unread email in the seven segment display. Connect your Raspberry Pi to your PC using Putty and enter the following command to the terminal:
sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install feedparser
sudo easy_install -U distribute
sudo apt-get install python-rpi.gpio
We will access our Facebook account using Facebook Graph API. Most request of Graph API need an access token as a parameter. An access token is unique to the combination of a logged in user or page and the Facebook App that makes the request. A token is associated with a Facebook app to handle the permissions that the user has granted to the app.
To get Access Token follow the steps:
1. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer
2. Click the button on the right to Get Token Drop Down came down to it.
3. Choose to Page Access Token
To access your Twitter account you need Access Key. Click here to learn how to get Twitter Access Key. Got it? Now, we need to download tweepy, an excellent python module to access Twitter API. To download and install just type the command:
sudo pip install tweepy
We are ready with Access Key and required module. It is the time to make fun with it. Copy the code snippet and save it to twitter-test.py.The MAX7219 lets us control lots and lots of LEDs using just a few Raspberry Pi pin-outs. No hassles with multiplexing, latching, refreshing or using up all your outputs – it handles everything for us. We just send commands to the MAX7219 and we can control up to 64 LEDs (a 8×8 LED Matrix) or eight seven (8 including the decimal point) segment displays, you can even chain multiple MAX7219s together to drive loads more. All this via just a few pins.
Both the Raspberry Pi and the MAX7219 support SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface), a good idea then to the get the RPi to talk to a MAX7219 via its very own SPI interface. By default SPI protocol is turned off but you can enable it very easily and can send and receive data.
Before going further, lets connect Raspberry Pi to MAX7219 IC. Here is the pin out:
We are ready with Access Key and required module. It is the time to make fun with it. Copy the code snippet and save it to twitter-test.py.For more detail: Raspberry Pi Desk Notifier
