DoES Liverpool was lent an Ultimaker 2 Extended as part of an art and community support project to 3D print prosthetic hands for children in and around Liverpool, as a way to allow printing to continue while the art exhibition was still on. But because it was suddenly the tallest 3D printer that DoES had access to and it wasn’t being used straight away, it was too tempting to see what the tallest thing we could print as a DoES community project — and just out the office window is St John’s Beacon (aka The Radio City Tower).

While we modelled the tower and broke it into parts for 3D printing, other DoES members looked at the electronics side. With the writing round the side of the original replaced by light up blocks with embedded RGB LEDs that spell out “DoES Liverpool” and colour controlled downlights, it was shaping up to be a great, 1m high exhibition piece. So when the twitter bot is running, it’s possible to send a tweet to @DoESTower with the name of any HTML 5 colour, which will change the colour of the tower downlights, then the bot will tweet you back, along with a picture of the tower showing off it’s new colour choice.