yoursunny blog
computer, Internet, and life

Watch @EmojiTetra Live on ESP32 OLED Display

Junxiao Shi

@EmojiTetra is an online game resembling Tetris, hosted on Twitter platform. Every 20 minutes, the @EmojiTetra account posts a tweet that displays the current game board, along with a four-option poll that allows visitors to vote for the game's next move: left, right, down, rotate, or plummet.

a tweet by @EmojiTetra

I find this game interesting. To watch or participate in @EmojiTetra, I need to unlock my tablet, open Twitter app, search for "EmojiTetra", and scroll past the pinned tweet in order to see the current game move. In total, this process needs 17 taps. Looking at the 0.96 inch OLED display on my Heltec WiFi_Kit_32 (paid link) board, I'm thinking: can I play @EmojiTetra on an ESP32?

Twitter API

Twitter offers an API that allows applications to retrieve and post tweets. GET statuses/user_timeline resource, for example, retrieves a collection of the most recent tweets posted by a specific user. To watch the game, "user timeline" is exactly what I need to retrieve the current game state.

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Repost Twitter to Facebook through Losant and IFTTT

Junxiao Shi

Twitter and Facebook are two primary social networks that I regularly use. Despite many arguments against synchronizing contents across different accounts, I still think it's beneficial to repost my tweets onto my Facebook timeline. There are already many solutions to achieve cross-posting between Twitter and Facebook, but they are not ideal, because I'm very picky on what I want:

  • I want to cross-post from Twitter to Facebook, not the other way around.
  • I want to tweet with native Twitter clients, not through a third party website or app.
  • I don't want those tweets created by my Swarm check-ins to be re-posted onto Facebook, because Swarm app can directly post to Facebook.
  • For plain text tweets, I want them as plain text Facebook status updates, without a link to Twitter which could only confuse my Facebook friends.
  • If I tweet a photo, I want that photo to be uploaded to Facebook, instead of posting a link on Facebook.
  • If I tweet a link to some webpage, I want Facebook to display a preview of the webpage.

IFTTT is one of my favorite online services. It allows me to create a recipe for certain automated actions. The name "IFTTT" stands for IF This Than That, where This could be "posting a new tweet", and That could be "posting a Facebook status". However, IFTTT does not allow filtering: I couldn't specify conditions like "the tweet is not posted by Swarm", which is necessary to achieve my goals. Therefore, I need a more advance solution to repost my Twitter feed to Facebook.

This year the world is greeted with Losant, an Internet of Things platform that allows makers to connect their sensor devices, collect data into the cloud, and take actions through workflow execution. While neither Twitter nor Facebook has anything to do with IoT, Losant workflow has some great capabilities that makes it suitable for non-IoT usage:

  • trigger execution from a timer or an HTTP request
  • parse and stringify JSON
  • send HTTP request to any server
  • store execute state in a variable
  • most importantly, execute raw JavaScript!
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Build a Free SMS Robot with Google Voice

Junxiao Shi
last updated

I have been look for a free SMS API since April, when my previous free SMS provider, IMified, announced its shutdown.

Zeep Mobile claims to be free forever (because it is ad-supported), but my sign-up is unanswered after a few weeks. Twilio and Tropo both give developers some free credit, but they charge money for production use. Other resources are suggesting an in-house solution: buy a SIM card with cheap / unlimited text plan, plug it into an old phone, and connect to the server; this still costs money, and is impossible for those using a VPS.

As a Google Voice user, I'm thinking: can I use Google Voice to build a free SMS robot?

Google Voice API

Google, the company who release an API for almost every product, does not provide a Google Voice API.

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GAppProxy架构及协议分析

Junxiao Shi

GAppProxy是一款基于Google App Engine的HTTP代理服务器，GAppProxy的作者是dugang。

GAppProxy是用Python语言编写的，包含客户端、fetch服务器、负载平衡器三个模块。

精巧型代理服务器hProxyN的20090223版本加入了GAppProxy插件。 GAppProxy插件使hProxyN可以通过GAppProxy协议转发请求。

GAppProxy模块组成

客户端

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