So I got the poster printed, and the LEDs currently show through the board pretty well. This is good:

But last night I spent a good chunk of my evening and early morning hitting a lot of walls:

• I might have to throw out the idea of using the Twitter Streaming API. For the kind of searches I need to do, I just can’t get enough granularity to use live information. Plus, I can only open one connection to the API at a time, which is not good if I need to run four listeners at a time.

• I couldn’t get the Classifier Ruby gem to work; which looked like the easiest implementation of an LSI/naive Bayes classifier out there. The next closest thing was nltk, and there was no way in heck I had the time to figure that out. Plus, I realized that creating a training set was a LOT more work than I thought I had. So… scratch the machine intelligence out of this. I’m just going to manually search for specific search terms.

• New solution: Periodically use the Search API to grab results. This allows more exact search results and gives me the ability to tweak the search terms while the demo loop is running.

• Event-driven programming is throwing me for a loop (ha, get it?). After perusing the node.js docs for the better part of an evening, I think I need to re-architect the code. I need to create a simple event-driven queue, which is confusing because it seems like something simple, yet support isn’t built in. node provides so little out of the box.

• It could be more difficult to set up a socket connection to Arduino than I thought. I may have to set up a socket connection in python with python-firmata to interface with the Arduino. Other Arduino/serial proxies report not working well with Snow Leopard.

• I haven’t yet thought about the Web interface.

• I haven’t thought about how I’m going to hang the piece. I have some scrap wood and fishing wire, but I haven’t thought about whether it’s possible to hang all those LED arrays w/o some weird gravity issues.

• Woodwork help? I need to figure out how to use a rotary saw.

So uh, yeah, I’m getting nowhere but at least I know what I still need to do.