Jealous of our parent corporation’s tradition of handmade holiday gifts, Pointless Corp. set out to create a tradition of our own this holiday season: Jinglebots. Handcrafted with cardboard and love, these bots give your holiday tweets a voice — think Speak & Spell with a heavy dose of eggnog.
For a few cheerful weeks in December, every tweet with the hashtag #jinglebots will be read aloud by Klaus 5000, Ru 2 Dee 2 and Cornelius for all to see and hear via Dropcam video. In addition to hearing each robot say your tweet, you can observe their endearing facial expressions chatting while a special holiday GIF(t) with your name on it is displayed nearby. But that’s not all — with the help of Arduino technology, each Jinglebot triggers a relay that brings their holiday scene to life right before your eyes.
Members of the holiday cheer committee at three Viget locations pointlessly constructed these festive scenes. The cardboard creation and decoration of these beautiful creatures was led by Jason Toth, while their intelligence, eloquence, and knack for controlling electronics can be credited to Eli Fatsi. The site itself is the hard work of Nate Hunzaker, who brought the designs of Mark Steinruck to life. Other holiday cheer committee members that deserve props include Lance Gutin, Becky Tornes, Joseph Le, Anjali McKenzie, and Khanh Stenberg for their various holiday miracles along the way.
Our Jinglebots leverage a host of technologies, including Redis, Twitter, EventMachine, Arduino, Dino, Node.js (Express), Canvas, Amazon S3, Dropcam — and a partridge in a pear tree. Play with everyone’s favorite new holiday toys at jinglebots.com or if you’re feeling ambitious, set up your own Jinglebot using our open source holiday coding magic.
Happy holidays from all of us at Pointless Corp.!
