Our example application prints an ongoing timeline of live “tweets” from Twitter. Even if you don’t use the Twitter service yourself, you’ll still need to sign up for an account to use the search function in software. If you don’t yet have one, begin at the Twitter homepage and use the sign-up form:

In addition to some basic account information, you’ll need to provide a real email address in order to confirm and activate the account. Within a few minutes you should receive an email with an activation link.

Once you have an account and have logged in, you can then proceed to dev.twitter.com (the Twitter Developers home page). At the top right is a pull-down menu including the option “My applications”:

From this page, select the “Create a new application” button:

You’ll be asked for some basic information about your application — the tweet-printing program we’ll be loading on the Arduino. Provide a reasonable name and description…we don’t know if applications are audited, but being honest and descriptive here would be helpful. You also need to provide a Website URL. If you have a personal or company web site, enter that on the form, else you can use Adafruit’s home page.

You’ll need to agree to the developer terms of service and complete a CAPTCHA before finalizing your application. Read, agree, complete the puzzle and click “Create your Twitter application”:

Once your application is created, there will be a long screen full of information about it (shown abbreviated here). At the bottom of this page, click the button labeled “Create my access token”:

Once you complete these steps, you’ll have the full set of credentials needed to authorize your application. In a moment we’ll copy and paste these four strings into an Arduino sketch: Consumer key, Consumer secret, Access token, and Access token secret.

Do not share these strings with anyone—they’re for the secure and exclusive use of your application. If you’re sharing source code via Github or other management system, remember to remove these before posting the code!