Berg Creates #Flock, A Twitter-driven Cuckoo Clock

London-based design consultancy Berg has built interesting Twitter-driven cuckoo clock for Twitter UK that they call #Flock. While it’s easy to appreciate the lovely craftsmanship of these clocks, what’s even more interesting is how they’re wired into the Internet.

Using an Arduino board, the #Flock cuckoo will not just make a bird pop out to chirp at the top of every hour, but it’ll also make an appearance when someone on your timeline retweets you or replies to you, or if you get a new follower.

If this is sounding a little familiar to you, it might be because the way #Flock works is the same as the Tweet to Bleat toy that The Neighbourhood hacked to bleat every time the firm was tweeted at for a Masterclass on this site in October last year.

Despite both project having an Arduino at their core, #Flock uses the Berg Cloud platform – in fact, it was created as a proof-of-concept for that platform.

The Berg Cloud Bridge platform is a wireless interface that allows designers to connect their hardware projects to the Internet.

As you can see from our Masterclass, it’s perfectly possible to do what #Flock does using the Arduino alone – but the platform provides a bedrock for more complex instructions and interactions to be passed between the web and physical devices.

  #Flock, Arduino, Berg, Cloud, Creative, Cuckoo Clock, Digital, Innovation, Limited Edition, Twitter