Electric eel learns to tweet with a little help from Raspberry Pi

Move over Chattanooga Chuck. The Tennessee Aquarium has a new animal stealing the social media spotlight.
 
The forecasting groundhog was busy tweeting last Groundhog’s Day, but now Miguel Watson, the zoo’s Amazonian electric eel is getting in on the action.
 
Miguel Watson. One big jolt from an electric eel could light up 20, 40-watt DC light bulbs for an instant.

So how exactly does an electric eel conduct its own Twitter account? With the help of a Raspberry Pi, of course.
 
Electric eels have the ability to discharge up to 860 volts of electricity from three of their organs that are composed of electrolytes. The organic cells work like the voltaic pile in an early battery and the eel uses the charge to stun prey, communicate and navigate the waters.
 
Even though and electric eel (actually a type of knifefish) only discharges a jolt of electricity that lasts a few milliseconds, it is still capable of electrocuting a grown human. 

Until Miguel Watson got his own Twitter account, it was impossible to know exactly when the eel was discharging electricity. 

A team of students from Tennessee Tech University placed probes, an amplifier and an LED meter into the water to help detect the eel’s discharges. When Miguel releases electricity, the display sounds off. 

Using the sensors and display, the team realized that Miguel discharges at least a little bit of energy most of the time so he has the ability to send out a lot of tweets. The team created a computer-coded “fuse box” to make sure Miguel didn’t break the Internet with an excessive amount of spam tweets. 

The project’s main component was a Raspberry Pi since it’s low-cost but could provide all the necessary functionality in a compact package—Wi-Fi, multiple programming languages, low power consumption and continuous operation capabilities. 

The Tennessee Tech University’s Business Media Center helped out with the tweet composition and fans can follow along on Miguel’s feed to see if the most recent jolt of energy had enough amperage to trigger a tweet. 

So far Miguel has tweeted over 60 times and attracted over 300 followers, but he still has a lot of work to do to catch up to the Aflac Duck with 67,000 followers.
 
Check out these other famous animals with Twitter accounts:

Aflac Duck: @aflacduck
The Energizer Bunny: @EnergizerBunny
The Bronx Zoo Cobra: @BronxZoosCobra
Sockamillion the Cat: @sockington