GreenWali Diwali:A social interactivity experiment

Pune, India

Well we all know the catastrophic outcomes of burning crackers, its pollution (noise,material,air), killing those pigeons you probably have been feeding the whole year and nightmares for the pets. Crackers from where I see it, are a means of social exhibition to reflect your happiness about a cause. They have :

So, This Diwali , I decided to mimic some of the above traits without causing any pollution, so this will be a GreenWali Diwali .

The idea was to reiterate the experience of fire crackers by amalgamating the light,sound and randomness associated with it electronically .

For the installation, i used the Rasperry Pi ( as it was in my Arm’s Reach :P ) and some Python to search Twitter for tweets that were supporting the cause for a green Diwali by tracking the hastag #Diwali and then parsing the tweets to check if they sounded ‘Green’ and if its true then a random firecracker audio file gets played on the Pi and a LED gets lit up / GPIO goes high so you can use another slave mcu to flicker some LEDs.

Update : Twitter has probably Rate Limited the streaming of the #Diwali and #HappyDiwali due to huge volumes, so the new Hash tag is #GreenDiwali and filter term is happy ! Tweet Tweet! which means tweet with a #GreenDiwali and there should be the word happy in it.

Yeah ! We could also do sentiment analysis of the tweet and only proceed if the tweet has a positive sentiment !

That’s pretty much it. So someone else would actually be blowing the cracker in your house. Hail the Internet !

I would really like people to tweet with the word green and #Diwali as i have been using the installation and the only thing i see in the feeds in people retweeting a company’s GreenTea advert to win some green tea this Diwali . Some of my friends like RohitKsingh did tweet. Hoping to hear more tweets. It would also be awesome if makers around the world with a Pi (in Arm’s Length :P) could install/improve this in their community to raise awareness about not burning crackers.

The code is available here. The only thing you will need are Twitter Outh Tokens.For them just do the following :

These 4 keys are used for the Code above.

Then just install the dependencies based on the README and use your PC/Mobile to run the App on a Headless Pi. JuiceSSH is recommended for Android. If you wish to leave it for longer durations use screen to send a SSH instance in the background and exit the SSH Client.

Check out the video of me testing it !

Happy GreenWali Diwali !

Rohit