Soapse stands for “Self Operated Auto-Poetic Status Emancipator”. It is the manifestation of the subconcious The half-ideas that we don’t speak of. The nonsense that happens in our dreams. It is a small device, convinently packaged within a soap box that has its own Twitter account. The soap box aligns with the theme of privacy. Only the use of soap knows about their own soap, just like a Twitter account. Usernames and passwords are only the electronic versions of keys and lockers.
The hardware for SOAPSE consists of an Arduino Diecimila as well as the official Ethernet Shield purchased at RobotShop.ca.
The poems are generated using a PHP script hosted on a home machine and 2 public APIs, one for Twitter as well as one for words. The poems generated will not always make sense, but will always be syntactically correct (as far as the English language is concerned). This is done using basic linguistic rules about sentence syntax and applying them to a pool of words seeded from a small initial list.
Here are some pictures about the development. The captions detail what’s going on in each photo.
Because this piece of hardware is extremely network dependant, I made a short video of the SOAPSE in action to prove this is not all a hoax.
Last but not least, for those who would like to do something similar, I provide the source code for the project (minus the usernames, passwords and API keys). The code running on the Arduino itself is mostly the example that is given for the Ethernet library, Client class.