Tessel’s First Tweet

Because Tessel runs Node, we can leverage the thousands of libraries that the Node community has made.

This code snippet makes Tessel send a tweet from a dummy account (@TesselTweet) that we’ve created for this purpose.

If you would prefer to post from your own account, go to apps.twitter.com, create your own OAuth tokens with read and write permissions, and paste them into the script.

Create a new directory within your “tessel-code” directory:

mkdir tessel-tweet; cd tessel-tweet; t2 init

Use npm to install the Twitter library that the Node.js community has built:

npm install twitter

Rename the “index.js” file you’ve just created to “tweet.js”, then copy and paste the below script over the existing text:

// Node requires
var twitter = require('twitter');

var twitterHandle = '@tesselproject';
// The status to tweet
var status = 'Hello ' + twitterHandle + '. This is your #Tessel 2 speaking.';

// These OAuth credentials are for the dummy @TesselTweet account
// Paste in your own OAuth details if you want to tweet from your own account
var twit = new twitter({
  consumer_key: 'O7oc0pvsZn4xjgcuHuYdX4FaC',
  consumer_secret: 'iJYuHFz2sD46Nvk3mcwzX8uih14aEAMgVWdWoR59nx8v6Zl7ZX',
  access_token_key: '2529232909-luARGU89K4CKFMvfzBjCgG6ubefzDkdDWkSB85i',
  access_token_secret: 'GXQfuzvGdjLEs3t1HEYfhQ9x9bdBcSBVXjBkbRgwYlOE0'
});

// Make a tweet!
twit.post('statuses/update', {status: status}, function(error, tweet, response){
  if (error) {
    console.log('error sending tweet:', error);
  } else {
    console.log('Successfully tweeted! Tweet text:', tweet.text);
  }
});

Change the “twitterHandle” var to your own Twitter handle and save.

Make sure you’re connected to Wifi, then run:

t2 run tweet.js

Check Twitter for your tweet!

Bonus: Try making Tessel tweet output from a module.

Extra bonus: What’s another Node module you can try out? Maybe Twilio, PubNub, Plotly, Firebase? Surf around on npm until you find a Node library you like, then try using it with Tessel.