One of the unofficial requirements for working at Temboo is that you have to be a fan of 3D printing. This isn’t particularly onerous, of course, because 3D printing is very cool, and most people who have seen a 3D printer in action walk away impressed. The technology has applications ranging from surgery to space exploration, and, as it turns out, it comes in handy for building cool Temboo projects as well! Manuel Orduño, a hardware specialist from Hermosillo, Mexico, combined Temboo and 3D printing to make his Like Lamp, which was a big hit around our office.

Manuel was participating in a local Arduino Day event, and wanted to find an interesting way to show what can be done with Temboo and an Arduino Yún. He also wanted to bring some attention to D’Sun Labs, a group working to promote physical computing in his area (we’ve encountered Mexico’s growing tech scene before!). To accomplish both tasks at once, Manuel created a lamp that would light up every time someone liked the D’Sun Labs Facebook page. He used Temboo’s Facebook > Reading > GetObject Choreo to track the total number of likes on the page, and then programmed his Yún to blink a set of blue LEDs for each new like that came in.

There are two elements of Manuel’s lamp that we particularly liked. The first, of course, is that he chose to enclose the LED string in a custom-printed 3D Facebook “like” icon. It looks great, it drives home the point of the device, and it’s a cool integration of 3D printing and Temboo. The second is that, in his own words,

I had never worked with the web before, so terms like OAuth, APIs, tokens, etc., were totally unfamiliar to me. But the Temboo service simplified this A LOT—I think I would not have managed to make it in time without it.

We’re always trying to make it easier for hardware developers to tap the power of the cloud and for software developers to get their hands messy with physical devices, so that’s exactly the sort of thing we want to hear. Or, if you will, that’s exactly the sort of thing Temboo likes!