When he made his debut at Barcamp Liverpool, Bubblino was a fairly simple being. He was reliant on a computer to search twitter and work out whether there were any new messages, with the code on Bubblino himself just taking care of turning on and timing the bubble blowing.

That made sense for the first version, as he was demonstrating what a beginner to the Arduino platform could achieve. In my talk at the Barcamp, I showed step-by-step how to build your own Twitter-watching, Arduino-bot.

The problem with that mechanism was that he had to be close to my laptop, because that was checking Twitter and sending the results to Bubblino via Bluetooth. When I went out of range (such as attending a session in a different room) then Bubblino went to sleep.

Obviously, it would be better if Bubblino was self-sufficient. So, for his second outing, to Bookcamp/Papercamp, he gained some new hardware. An ethernet shield was added which means that he plugs straight into the network, and his software has been updated so that he talks to Twitter directly. This means that he just needs a power supply and an ethernet cable to be up and blowing bubbles, as you can see below in this video of him in action at Bookcamp.