Twitter-Enabled LED Belt Buckle

Maker Brian Moreau recently received an LED belt buckle that displays letters as a gift. As cool as that is by itself, he decided to enhance it even further by adding an ESP8266–01 Wi-Fi module in order to program letters automatically.

The hardware setup for the mod is actually pretty simple, but required a voltage regulator in order to feed the ESP the required 3.3V, as the belt buckle runs on 6V. Messages displayed on the buckle are normally selected by tediously scrolling through and entering letters with a pair of buttons, but the module instead does this by manually switching the buttons high and low. The fact that it’s such a simple input method is works out well given the module’s limited IO pins.

While automatic programming certainly increases the usefulness of the device, Moreau went a few steps further and configured it to show tweets based on a Twitter search term. This can be a certain hashtag, or even tweets directed at a certain person if you so prefer.

Code is available on the project’s write-up, and requires programming both the ESP module, as well as implementing PHP code that runs elsewhere. While this might not work with every LED buckle, it’s an interesting experiment and a great starting point for wireless interactive gadgets!