Software:

The goal on the software side was to get the statuses of the people a specific user follows, determine whether those statuses were overall more positive or negative, and then send that information to the ambient device. 

Iteration 1: In the first iteration, we tried to use IFTTT to create a recipe that would publish an event whenever a specific user tweeted. A link to the applet can be found here: https://ifttt.com/applets/49694825d-if-new-tweet-by-specific-user-moneyg67-then-publish-an-event. The main problem with IFTTT was that there was no option to publish an event when a set of users tweeted. For that, it seemed we would have to create a new applet for each user. That was not scalable. Another problem was that there was an arbitrary (and thus unpredictable) delay between a tweet being posted and an event being published. So we decided that IFTTT wasn't the best tool to use.