adafruit industries blog » tweet-a-watt

RaspiWatt: discover power consumption using a Kill-A-Watt & Pi

Matt — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Drew Fustini on the Element 14 blog made his own adaptation of the Adafruit Tweet-A-Watt kit, this time built around the Raspberry Pi!

Say you want to know how much electricity an air purifier is consuming?

You can hook it up to the nifty Kill-A-Watt power meter (aka KaW). The KaW will keep track of and display the killowatt-hours, or kWh, used by the plugged in device.

However, the total will be reset anytime the KaW is unplugged and loses power. Limor Fried (aka ladyada) recognized this shortcoming and created the clever Tweet-A-Watt project which mods the KaW by soldering a XBee wireless data module to the KaW’s op-amp chip.

The XBee’s built-in ADC reads the current and voltage signals inside the KaW and transmits it to a receiver XBee module connected to a computer. This diagram by ladyada gives a good sense of the architecture:

The Tweet-A-Watt (TaW) is an awesome project, but I felt the computer seemed cumbersome and power hungry. Thankfully, we live in an era of powerful, tiny & cheap single board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi . I decided to use the Pi in place of a traditional computer along the Adafruit LCD Pi Plate and the Adafruit Pi Box enclosure. The receiver XBee module connects to the Pi via a FTDI USB-to-serial cable.

Ladyada used Google AppEngine for graphing the TaW data, but I decided to take advantage of the newer Cosm sensor data graphing service (formerly named Pachube). Below is a screenshot of my RaspiWatt Cosm feed showing Watts, kWh, and USD$ (based on the cost of a kWh for my power company)…

Meet the WattMote (Moteino based Tweet-A-Watt) #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Matt — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:00:00 +0000

From LowPowerLab, via a tip from Kevin Groce!

I assembled my Moteino circuit inside the KillAWatt. Everything fits very nicely and the LED blinks every ~2 seconds, and data finds its way to my RaspberryPi where EmonCMS records and graphs it nicely. At the last minute I found a leftover TMP36 analog temperature sensor that I had around, and thought – why not add it to the Moteino and report temperature along with power readings?

I feared the TMP36 sensor alone would draw too much power (even an extra constant 2mA is too much for my KAW!). But it turns out it’s a very low power sensor (just 0.05mA). Since Adafruit has a very nice demo and code for TMP36, I won’t replicate the details here, you can check them out at Adafruit’s learning system.

Now I’m getting temperature, voltage and current waveform readings from my KAW.

How Much Does it Cost to Light Christmas Lights?

adafruit — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 14:36:13 +0000

How Much Does it Cost to Light Christmas Lights?.

There seems to be a lot of concern about how much money other people are spending on electricity for their Christmas lights. I’m happy to report, it doesn’t cost much.

The price of electricity varies from place to place, and from time to time, but a typical price is 12¢ per kilowatt hour. That means that if you burn 1,000 watts for the span of one hour, you’ll pay 12¢.

Map Energy Use in NYC Buildings

adafruit — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:45:27 +0000

Model Created to Map Energy Use in NYC Buildings @ The Fu Foundation School of Engineering & Applied Science – Columbia University via BB.

Modi’s team performed a statistical analysis to estimate New York City-specific building energy use. Their statistical model utilizes zipcode-level energy consumption data to estimate the average annual energy use for every tax lot—at practically building level—through all five boroughs of the city.

This energy use was further broken down into what the building uses for space heating, space cooling, water heating, and base electric applications such as lighting, and, with this information, the Columbia Engineering team created an interactive web map that shows what type of energy is being used, for which purpose, and in what quantity. “This map will enable NYC building owners to see whether their own building consumes more or less than what an average building with similar function and size would,” said Professor Modi. “This is the first time anyone has provided an estimate like this for New York City and the first time anyone has offered information to the public in the form of an interactive map.”

Devices will favorite, tag, like, follow, friend and un-friend

adafruit — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 05:00:40 +0000

We’re working on our product line up for 2012 and it’s going to be filled with great stuff all of you are going to do amazing things with. One of the things we’re thinking about is how many of the products/projects like the Arduino are getting more networked, and therefore the sensors attached are getting more networked.

One of the earliest projects we did to show this was through a real shipping product was the Tweet-a-watt.

Very soon, with makers/hackers leading the way, devices will favorite, tag, like, follow, friend and un-friend. People like to do this, but smart connected devices will like to do this even more. What it will mean for artists, designers and engineers who creatively use these technologies?

Perhaps one day your Tweeting power meter will automatically “friend” the other ones you install in your home, and if you’re publicly sharing the data they’ll follow others in your area. We believe in open-source and open-source hardware, so you’re always able to know what is being shared, stored and how the device works. We think this is important.

We hope to have some fun examples soon, we’ll be showing some cool stuff on some upcoming ASK AN ENGINEER shows about all this, stay tuned.

Best IoT Open Source Project 2011

adafruit — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:20:50 +0000

Best IoT Open Source Project 2011 @ Postscapes.

A truly innovative Internet of Things will be based on a culture of sharing and collaboration. This award recognizes the year’s best Open Source contributions.

In the DIY project category Tweet-a-watt is there!

A Rice Cooker wants to be my Friend on Twitter

adafruit — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:14:09 +0000

A Rice Cooker wants to be my Friend on Twitter. Miranda writes -

Hello, I’ve just published a conference paper, “A Rice Cooker wants to be my Friend on Twitter” (in the ETHICOMP 2011 proceedings), which gives a reference to Tweet-a-Watt. I thought you might like to know.

Pervasive computing devices are already using Twitter as a communication channel. In the future you may receive unwanted friend requests from inanimate objects. Even if you refuse them all, receiving frequent friend requests can be annoying, and may lead you to mistakenly refuse some welcome friend requests. There are some Twitter validation services which assist and partially automate the decision of which requests to accept; but these have limitations. Without improved validation services, the rise of pervasive computing devices on Twitter or similar networks may degrade the experience of the human users of these networks.

Tweet-a-Watt is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data. This pack contains nearly everything* necessary to build a single outlet monitor and receiver. To monitor additional outlets, you will need an add-on transmitter pack. One outlet can monitor up to 1500 Watts.

The starter pack contains:

2 XBee modules (one for receiver, one for transmitter)
2 XBee adapter kits (ditto)
1 USB FTDI cable (for updating, configuring and receiving data from XBee)
1 bag of parts including 10,000uF capacitor, 220uF capacitor, 2 1% 10K resistors, 2 1% 4.7K resistors, 5mm green LED, 6″ rainbow ribbon cable, and 2 pieces of 1/8″ and 1/16″ heatshrink

In stock!

What’s inside a smart meter?

adafruit — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 04:39:48 +0000

What’s inside a smart meter? @ EDN.

The technicians at iFixit got their hands on an Elster Rex2 Watt-hour meter with features that an old-fashioned motor-driven meter lacks: nonvolatile memory with 1 million write cycles, advanced security with full 128-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption, the ability to make remote upgrades, and support for 900-MHz and 2.4-GHz ZigBee communication. The meter can also track overall power usage by time, which raises privacy concerns for some utility customers. On the other hand, some customers welcome the ability to parse their power usage to better manage it and, they hope, save money.

The eBay of Electricity

adafruit — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 19:33:46 +0000

The eBay of Electricity @ Forbes.

Bruce Hoult is a software engineer in Wellington, New Zealand. Mr. Hoult signed up for Powershop last April 2009 – mainly to save money, but as soon as he discovered that Powershop offered an open API (Application Programming Interface) he started tinkering with it. Since nighttime power is 25% cheaper than daytime power he set out to shift some of his power usage from the day to evening. He works from his home office and he did what a good enterprising tinkerer does: he ran experiments with his own power usage putting together available technologies in new ways.

“I built a computerized device based on Arduino [a website that offers an open source hardware and software platform for rapid prototyping] that I programmed to turn my heater and dehumidifier on and off at different times of the day”, said Mr. Hoult. “After tracking power, temperature, and cost for a while, I determined that it was optimal to crank up the heater an hour or two before 7am when power cost goes up. It turns out that the walls and the house itself retain a lot of the heat and slowly release it during the day. The result is that I use much less power during the day while maintaining the same temperatures as before.” Over the last twelve months Mr Hoult has saved NZ$500 or nearly 24% compared to the previous year.

I asked him if he was thinking about commercializing this device. “The payback is less than a year so there could be a market for it. However, I’m a technical guy. Marketing is definitely not my thing.”

Reminder: Google PowerMeter shutting down

adafruit — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 04:00:41 +0000

Reminder: Google PowerMeter shutting down – from Google -

In the coming months, we’re going to retire two products that didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped, but did serve as influential models: Google Health (retiring January 1, 2012; data available for download through January 1, 2013) and Google PowerMeter (retiring September 16, 2011). Both were based on the idea that with more and better information, people can make smarter choices, whether in regard to managing personal health and wellness, or saving money and conserving energy at home. While they didn’t scale as we had hoped, we believe they did highlight the importance of access to information in areas where it’s traditionally been difficult.

Here’s something we didn’t know before – Bill Weihl is Google energy Czar.

Previously:
Google gives up Power Metering – Google PowerMeter API deprecated
Google vs. Microsoft in online smart meter monitoring
Tweet-a-Watt and Google PowerMeter… it’s your turn
Tweet-a-Watt now works with Google Powermeter!
Google Code Blog: Google PowerMeter API introduced for device manufacturers
Google’s household energy monitor arrives in UK, still closed, ignoring engineers, tinkerers, makers…

PROTOTYPE: Thermal Tweeter, networked Twitter printer @dangerousproto

adafruit — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 18:22:30 +0000

PROTOTYPE: Thermal Tweeter, networked Twitter printer @dangerousproto…

Send a Tweet to @dangerousproto and watch it print live on the USTREAM feed.

This is a soft-launch of our project for the Adafruit/Instructables Make it Tweet Challenge. We’ll have some documentation up on Instructables tomorrow, but we need your help stress testing the system today.

Adafruit + Instructables Make It Tweet Challenge We’re teaming up with Instructables to bring you the Make It Tweet Challenge. Ever wish you had a tweeting coffee pot that would announce via Twitter when a pot was ready? What about a potted plant that twittered when it needed to be watered? This is your chance to make it tweet! How can you win the Adafruit Make It Tweet Challenge? Submit a Photo, Step-by-Step or Video Instructable explaining how you made an object tweet. Create awesome photos, good documentation and clear steps for how your project works. Your creativity and ingenuity may rewarded by winning awesome prizes!

Send a Tweet to Your Office Door

adafruit — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:52:07 +0000

Send a Tweet to Your Office Door @ IEEE Spectrum Erico writes -

Here at IEEE Spectrum, staffers routinely put Post-It notes on their doors and cubicles to let colleagues know they’re out. But you can’t slap a note on your door if you decide to work at home at the last minute—which, as I learned this winter, happens quite often when you have a very pregnant wife about to go into labor any instant.
That’s why I set out to replace those yellow sheets of self-adhesive stationery with something less, uh, analog—something that would allow me to post the updates electronically. An idea then popped up in my head: Twitter for my door.

It turns out to be a simple DIY project that an experienced hobbyist can complete in a few hours. Or if you’re me and this is your first serious hardware project, it might take you a couple of months and nearly drive you insane.

It worked out in the end. Now, when I’m home—or actually anywhere with my phone—I can send a tweet to a small LCD that hangs by my door, thus keeping my coworkers informed of my whereabouts. The LCD also shows current weather conditions in New York City; I thought my colleagues would appreciate this value-added service.

Google gives up Power Metering – Google PowerMeter API deprecated

adafruit — Fri, 27 May 2011 18:31:21 +0000

Google gives up Power Meter, seems so – Google PowerMeter API deprecated…

The Google Power Meter API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011 to reflect that it’s no longer undergoing active development and experimentation, which is the hallmark of APIs in the Code Labs program. However, we have no current plans to remove functionality for existing users.

Google stopped updating their Power meter blog last year (Aug 31, 2010). For the power geeks, you can read our long history with Google’s power metering efforts / competition here. We think it’s an excellent case study for someone out there and a cautionary tale of what happens when Google gets in your market.

Here’s what we predicted July of last year…

At this point, and just our opinion, we’re not really sure PowerMeter is a serious effort at Google and if it will continue, the manager (Ed Lu) recently left, the forums are pretty low volume on the Google site and if you review the Tweet-a-Watt time line it’s not that encouraging for folks wanting to use Google PowerMeter. The folks from Google have posted here before and we’re hoping they re-consider how they’re deploying PowerMeters and what the goal of the project really is…

We got our Tweet-a-watt to work with the Google Power meter API for kicks despite Google ignoring the requests for access from the open source / open hardware community, Google chose only to work with commercial partners and not the thousands of Tweet-a-watt makers out there. It was mostly a war of the press releases as Google didn’t really do much in this space, only making sure other companies in the power metering arena stayed scared of Google, it worked. Google does a lot of cool things, but sometimes they get “grabby” in markets, freak people out, buy a bunch of stuff/people and then just kill off stuff it seems. Happens to lots of companies, Google is working on self-driving cars now.

All that said, we’re excited by the recent developments with Anrdroid + Arduino, mostly because it’s all OSHW and it will continue no matter who or what happens. If you want to build open source power meters, we’ve got you covered, always

The starter pack contains:

2 XBee modules (one for receiver, one for transmitter)

2 XBee adapter kits (ditto)

1 USB FTDI cable (for updating, configuring and receiving data from XBee)

1 bag of parts including 10,000uF capacitor, 220uF capacitor, 2 1% 10K resistors, 2 1% 4.7K resistors, 5mm green LED, 6″ rainbow ribbon cable, and 2 pieces of 1/8″ and 1/16″ heatshrink

“Netduino+ Tweeting Geiger Counter” – Adafruit + Instructables Make It Tweet Challenge

adafruit — Thu, 19 May 2011 16:47:01 +0000

The “Netduino+ Tweeting Geiger Counter” is a great example of the type of project you can enter for the Adafruit + Instructables Make It Tweet Challenge…

Tweet-a-watt ported to Ruby…

adafruit — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 16:30:54 +0000

rellik in the Adafruit forums writes -

I’ve ported the python library over to ruby, and used it in a small project to collect, graph, and publish the data. It’s on github, if anyone is interested.

The starter pack contains:

2 XBee modules (one for receiver, one for transmitter)

2 XBee adapter kits (ditto)

1 USB FTDI cable (for updating, configuring and receiving data from XBee)

1 bag of parts including 10,000uF capacitor, 220uF capacitor, 2 1% 10K resistors, 2 1% 4.7K resistors, 5mm green LED, 6″ rainbow ribbon cable, and 2 pieces of 1/8″ and 1/16″ heatshrink

Kill-A-Watt circuit schematic diagram, calibration procedure, model P4400

adafruit — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 19:24:48 +0000

Via the Adafruit forums, these are for people who want to do DIY energy monitoring using a Tweet-a-watt, the schematics are handy to know where to read data!

Another home hackable device?

adafruit — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 22:08:42 +0000

Cheap Wi-Fi Thermostats Arrive at Home Depot, Kevin writes in…

Low cost ($100) WiFi thermostat also has Zigbee support?!?! This smells like it might be a hackable device. Might even be a PID controller? If it is you could partner something like this with Tweet a Watts, a chumby and you have a good start on DIY home automation. “there is space for a ZigBee module to be plugged into the back of the thermostat, as well as space for a module to enable demand response” I would like to see if I can get an FCC id off one and look at some board images.

Google vs. Microsoft in online smart meter monitoring

adafruit — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:00:48 +0000

Google vs. Microsoft in online smart meter monitoring @ The Independent…

Microsoft announces the addition of a remote, real-time energy monitoring device to its Hohm service, while Google continues to expand its coverage as both vie for dominance of the smart meter market.

As the development of the smart grid continues, software manufacturers such as Google and Microsoft are throwing their weight behind developing online energy monitoring software.

It might be possible to have the Tweet-a-Watt work with the Microsoft hohm project, anyone working near/around this? Regardless, it’s likely good that Microsoft is hopping in to this arena, the Google PowerMeter project seems end-of-line?

Smart Energy: How to Measure It, How to Manage It

adafruit — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:00:43 +0000

Tweet-a-watt got some slide action on EDN’s “Smart Energy: How to Measure It, How to Manage It”… – via Twitter.

Smart Energy: How to Measure It, How to Manage It. Smart energy meters for the smart grid are just one example of how important it will be to measure power usage at the application. Alternative energy sources like solar and wind require power metering, and so do car charging ports for tomorrow electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. In addition, server farms will need to be able power usage at the server rack level to accurately charge their customers for server power costs. All of these come back to smart energy ICs that can measure and communicate power usage. EDN technical editor Margery Conner will host a webinar panel discussion on August 24th featuring senior industry experts in key aspects of Smart Energy. PDF slides here.

Intelligent power consumption adjustment device

adafruit — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:14:56 +0000

Intelligent power consumption adjustment device via HackerGadgets.

What we need is to come up with some clever way to user power when it is actually available. There is no need to tickle-charge our laptops and cell phones, or to run the compressor in our fridges when the grid is under heavy load. Nor do we need to start our washing machines during high-load periods. But unplugging adaptors, and delaying the start of our washing machines during high-load periods should not be a manual task. First, how should we know when to do so, and second how should we manage to race around our homes unplugging devices all the time. This calls for automation.

This sounds quite tricky! How can one build up an intelligent grid that can use power when it is available in the grid and throttle down when a cloud blocks the sun?

It may sound like a daunting task but in fact all the information to build such intelligent devices is already available on the grid today. All we need is for the appliance manufacturer and consumers to embrace the idea!

A DIY project could be a Tweet-a-watt + Power switch tail / Arduino / relay. Ping the power company, see if it’s peak, if it is – turn off, if not – time to charge.

Tweet-a-Watt and Google PowerMeter… it’s your turn

adafruit — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:19:04 +0000

Ok this is for the power geek folks, a quick recap – back in May we showed you how to get the Tweet-a-Watt working with Google PowerMeter. It’s working but it’s not “official”.

All the code is up on github. Once you have the Tweet-a-Watt working with the python scripts we provide, you can add a cool extension and have beautiful graphs generated thanks to Google Powermeter. We thought we were done, but not quite.

Later that month we tried to get the Tweet-a-Watt “officially” added to the Google PowerMeter page here or here (we met the Rus Heywood from Google at Maker Faire, he directed us to Steve Hines and Rolf Schreiber).

It seems there is another hoop to jump through and at this point we’re going to suggest that the interested makers help out. Here’s the note from Steve Hines, a Developer Programs Engineer at Google, working with the PowerMeter team:

The enrollment process for Powermeter has a mechanism that allows the automation of this step of the process. It requires that the enrollment request come with a URL is called after enrollment. The handler at this URL can store the required token and path automatically.

One potential solution would be to have your python code extended to create a listener running on the user’s local machine at localhost would receive this request. The listener could then parse the request, taking out the token and path and storing them in environment variables. The python API scripts you ship would then use these environment variables rather require the user to edit the scripts and manually add them.

You can review the complete Tweet-a-Watt timeline here. If anyone wants to help with this last bit let us know.

At this point, and just our opinion, we’re not really sure PowerMeter is a serious effort at Google and if it will continue, the manager (Ed Lu) recently left, the forums are pretty low volume on the Google site and if you review the Tweet-a-Watt time line it’s not that encouraging for folks wanting to use Google PowerMeter. The folks from Google have posted here before and we’re hoping they re-consider how they’re deploying PowerMeters and what the goal of the project really is, previously Google’s Ed Lu said…

“We are not trying to build a business model around it,” he said at VentureBeat’s GreenBeat conference last year. PowerMeter was part of Google.org, he noted, the company’s philanthropic arm.

We think ultimately Google will need to become a power company to meet it’s computational & storage demands, investing in a variety of power projects makes sense. The makers, tinkerers and students of today out there who use our power, solar and energy tracking kits are key to our future and Google’s future too. Google has the top minds in the world, we think the PowerMeter project should get a bit more love.

So with all this being said we’re hoping Google makes it a little easier for anyone to get any power meter to work with Google PowerMeter, specifically the hundreds (maybe thousands) of Tweet-a-Watt builders. The shifting priorities and management on Google PowerMeter likely makes it hard for the team doing to the work to get things done and the needs of the power metering makers are not likely a priority.

A lot of power start up buy our Tweet-a-watt to do prototyping and to later attract funding, our kit quickly allows them to do all the things they’d like to do later, then they can go to manufacturing, the last bit they ask about is the graphing and sometimes how it could work (easier) with Google PowerMeter.

From what we understand since Google is involved, even if it’s not in a major way in the “power industry” now, people in that space either worry about it, embrace it, want to work with them, compete or all of those. A lot of it is war-of-the-press-releases, but some of the concern may be valid – there’s also a lot of opportunity.

Regardless, if you want to start doing cool stuff with power metering and graphic, here’s what you can do immediately:

Text logging and graph yourself / spreadsheet
Use our tutorial to “tweet” power usage
Use our tutorial and use the Google App engine (this supports multiple Tweet-a-Watts)
There’s also an application you can use an app Energy Logger that a customer of ours made to store/graph/log.

Tweet-a-Watt now works with Google Powermeter!

adafruit — Mon, 17 May 2010 12:06:14 +0000

Breaking news! Tweet-a-Watt now works with Google Powermeter! and all the code is up on github. Once you have the Tweet-a-Watt working with the python scripts we provide, you can add a cool extension and have beautiful graphs generated thanks to Google Powermeter! This code, based on the original Tweet-a-watt, was created by the super-rad Devlin Thyne as special project with Adafruit (you can get a kit here).

You can download it from our source repository on github which now includes this script Please note that this mod is new, and is still under development, if you are having difficulties, try posting to the forums. Right now its only tested to work with a single Tweet-a-watt.

Google did release an API a few weeks ago, so this how it’s all working. Unfortunately, Google ignored our requests for access, choosing only to work with commercial partners and not the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Tweet-a-watt makers out there, we’re excited that anyone can now build their own power meter and have it work with Google Powermeter now. Hopefully someone from Google will read this and consider adding Tweet-a-watt as an official option (besides AlertMe, UK and TED, Energy Detective, US). We’re open source, we’re power metering that works, we’re a good option for many people who wish to share their power usage.

For those interested in all things “net connected power meter” related, here’s a brief history on the Tweet-a-watt and what we’ve been up to. You can see all of these via our Tweet-a-watt blog category too.

Present – hundreds of customers and makers are making and sharing their power usage.

March 4th, 2010 – Google PowerMeter API introduced for device manufacturers.

December 11, 2009 – Graham Winfrey at Yahoo and Business Insider says we are “dumb”.

October 28, 2009 – Google’s household energy monitor arrives in UK, still closed, ignoring engineers, tinkerers, makers…

October 6, 2009 – “Energy use information drives meaningful behavior change” – Google power meter has a device partner (ignores requests to be added).

August, 2009 – Tweet-a-watt in Popular Science

June 12, 2009 EnergyLogger – Tweet-a-Watt add-on

May 20, 2009 – CE smart grid using Tweet-a-watt.

April 2009 – Tweet-a-watt how-to in MAKE Volume 18: ReMake America

April 23, 2009 – Google powermeter (press site) Google engineer Ka-Ping Yee says “Tweet-a-Watt is a really cool project! We’re excited by all the interest around Tweet-a-Watt and other do-it-yourself energy-monitoring projects, and we’d love to have all kinds of devices working with Google PowerMeter. Please stay tuned”…. (we resent requests, we received auto-replies and were ignored).

April 20, 2009 – OurWatts – Graphs of Tweeted Energy Data – dozens of start ups are now using Tweet-a-watt for prototyping.

April, 2009 – HOW TO – Using the Tweet-a-watt with Pachube.com

April, 2009 – Tweet-a-watt wins “Best of Green: Science & Technology – Best gadget hack!”

April, 2009 – Hacking the ASUS router for the Tweet-a-Watt

March 26th, 2009 – Tweet-a-Watt kits become available

February 27, 2009 – “Twitter your energy footprint” on CNN

February 27, 2009 – Tweetin’ the Watts at Greener Gadgets WINS! (Wins the competition, Adafruit donates the prize money to Engineers without borders!)

February 26, 2009, Tweet-a-Watt on Attack of the Show (video)

February 2, 2009 – Ed Lu from Google quickly “announced” Powermeter a week after our published project appeared on popular blogs / tech sites.

January 24, 2009 – Adafruit (Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone) release “Wattcher! For when you want to watch your Watts“. A Twittering power meter that uses the Google app engine. Project entered in the Green Gadgets competition and published on popular blogs / tech sites. All of our work for this project was placed in the public domain to avoid patent squatters.

December 2008 – Adafruit (Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone) create “Wattcher” aka Tweet-a-watt.

2006-2007 – Phillip Torrone starts collecting equipment for testing a “share-able” power meter for use with instant message networks

The starter pack contains:

2 XBee modules (one for receiver, one for transmitter)

2 XBee adapter kits (ditto)

1 USB FTDI cable (for updating, configuring and receiving data from XBee)

1 bag of parts including 10,000uF capacitor, 220uF capacitor, 2 1% 10K resistors, 2 1% 4.7K resistors, 5mm green LED, 6″ rainbow ribbon cable, and 2 pieces of 1/8″ and 1/16″ heatshrink

Interactive Power Consumption Infographic

johngineer — Mon, 10 May 2010 10:04:11 +0000

GE has added a new interactive graphic on their website that details common appliances and the amount of power they use. You can choose which appliances you wish to “buy”, and it will add them up and present you with a “bill” — a report of total energy usage in kilowatts, dollars, or in terms of gallons of gas.

The data used is averaged from multiple sources, including the DoE’s Energy Star program, and from a number of public utility companies. If you want a more accurate value and/or do it yourself, you might consider using a Tweet-A-Watt.

EARTH DAY – Intel power meter – uses Adafruit Tweet-a-watt! #earthday

adafruit — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:23:41 +0000

Using the Intel® Energy Checker SDK at Home. Uses our Tweet-a-watt, Jamel @ Intel writes -

For my third blog entry on the Intel® Energy Checker SDK, I will take on a two-part DIY and super fun project. I always wanted to extend the use of the SDK into my home and be able to monitor my personal energy consumption. As an engineer, I live by the motto: “you cannot manage what you cannot measure”. Isn’t the electric bill all about that, one may ask? Sure, it is a good year-to-year and month-to-month trend indicator and it will likely fit the needs of most of us for a while. However, using my bill, I cannot break down my energy consumption per function. What is the cost of running my lab equipment in the garage? How much does the entertainment system cost us per month? Etc. To be honest, I do not know if this information will trigger some good changes in the way I run my electric equipments – I sincerely wish so –, but at least I will have the knowledge.

I was aware of the existence of a cool little device called Kill A Watt produced by P3 International (P4400). This power analyzer actually fit requirements #1, #2 and #4 out of the box. Unfortunately it is a closed device and it cannot share its readings with the outside world. Luckily, there is also a cool DIY kit from Adafruit Industries – called Tweet-a-Watt – which precisely allows you to turn a P4400 into a wireless power analyzer using Digi’s XBee® 802.15.4 RF modules. With this kit, requirement #3 can be met. Sure, there are many other devices and kits available in the market, but for my project, this was the best pick. If you decide to take on similar project using different device(s), please share your experience with us!

The SDK page can be found here.

Celebrate Earth Day 2010 with Adafruit – we’ll have posts all day and night with fun power/earth/green related projects and we’re having a one-time only sale on solar panels! Get a 2W solar panel 6V, 330mA out for $20, today only!

Google Code Blog: Google PowerMeter API introduced for device manufacturers

adafruit — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:00:11 +0000

Google Code Blog: Google PowerMeter API introduced for device manufacturers – looks like the Google PowerMeter will finally work with the very popular Tweet-a-Watt we sell. Now we’ll just need to wait for someone to glue it all together and post some code

Today we’re excited to introduce the Google PowerMeter API on code.google.com, for developers interested in integrating with Google PowerMeter. This API will allow device manufacturers to build home energy monitoring devices that work with Google PowerMeter. We’re launching this API in order to help build the ecosystem of innovative developers working towards making energy information more widely available to consumers.

In today’s launch of the API on code.google.com we are highlighting the core design principles towards integrating with Google PowerMeter. In particular we outline the underlying data model and the accompanying protocols to ensure that Google PowerMeter provides consumers access to their energy consumption with utmost care in maintaining the user’s privacy and control on access to the information. We also highlight, with code samples and client implementations, how to easily start building your PowerMeter-compatible device.

Yahoo and Business Insider says we are 2nd dumbest

adafruit — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 01:24:21 +0000

Over on Yahoo, Graham Winfrey picked the Tweet-a-watt as Yahoo’s #2 of 10 “dumbest green gadgets“.

The Tweet-a-Watt is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data. This pack contains nearly everything* necessary to build a single outlet monitor and receiver. To monitor additional outlets, you will need an add-on transmitter pack. One outlet can monitor up to 1500 Watts.

You can see the hundreds of (dumb?) kids, adults and hobbyists on Twitter who use the Tweet-a-watt on a daily basis to monitor: power, temperature, water levels, server stats and more. All using the open source power monitoring system we released earlier this year.

Interesting strategy Yahoo, while Google is working with some companies to release power monitoring hardware, APIs and software to monitor / reduce power (Google Power Meter) Yahoo and Business Insider are making top 10 lists about how dumb it is.

Google’s household energy monitor arrives in UK, still closed, ignoring engineers, tinkerers, makers…

adafruit — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:27:41 +0000

Google’s Household Energy Monitor Arrives in UK…

Google’s Energy Monitor allows householders to monitor energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, thereby reducing consumption and saving money. Google may be best known for helping you find things on the web, but the online search company’s latest move is a bid to make futuristic low-energy eco-homes a reality. Launching for the first time in the UK today, Google Powermeter is an online tool that allows householders to monitor their home’s energy use and greenhouse gas emissions via the web, and so reduce their consumption and save money.

Enthusiasts have previously developed kits using open-source code that allow homes to post their energy usage to Twitter, and several companies sell energy monitors – such as the OWL and Wattson – which show real-time electricity consumption on wireless handheld displays. One such gadget available in the US, the TED 5000, already works with Powermeter.

Some history – The open source Tweet-a-watt project was announced and released before the Google Powermeter, after the release we applied to Google’s program so the Tweet-a-watt could work with the Google Powermeter API, we received a generic form-letter response, and then later a Google engineer commented on our site…

Hi,I’m an engineer on the Google PowerMeter team. I think Tweet-a-Watt is a really cool project! We’re excited by all the interest around Tweet-a-Watt and other do-it-yourself energy-monitoring projects, and we’d love to have all kinds of devices working with Google PowerMeter. Please stay tuned. Comment by Ka-Ping Yee — April 28, 2009 @ 4:45 am

That was about 6 months ago. We’ve sent additional requests through the Google powered device form, but they’ve been ignored. There are thousands of people out there using the fully open source energy monitoring system based on the software (and hardware) of the Tweet-a-watt, which also uses Google’s app engine, it’s not clear why Google isn’t working with any of them or opening up their API so other power meters can use it.

Lastly, another Power meter maker wrote in a few months ago.

It’s almost 2 month later and our situation is like yours in April 2009. We are metering device manufacturer, we applied to the program and did not get any response from Google, not even stay tuned. The powermeter API seems to be something virtual. Comment by Robert — June 18, 2009 @ 5:27 pm

Hopefully things will change.

“Energy use information drives meaningful behavior change” – Google power meter has a device partner

adafruit — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:43:41 +0000

“Energy use information drives meaningful behavior change” – we agree! Google announced today that they have their first device partner (TED) that can publish your power usage to Google’s PowerMeter.

We made our Tweet-a-watt completely open, thousands of folks are using them (you can see many on Twitter and in many Google app engine examples)…

We also sent Google a request using their form for “device partners” but we only got an auto-reply back.

Eventually we posted about this on our site and a Google engineer commented.

In early 2009, a month after we released the Tweet-a-watt, Google announced their “PowerMeter” and now almost a year later they have their first device partner, we’re a little bummed that Google *could have* had thousands of Tweet-a-watt customers using the Google PowerMeter all this time but for whatever reason will not?

Twittering humador

adafruit — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:00:02 +0000

Longashes (a cigar social network) made a twittering humador… They write -

I know what you’re thinking.. “not another device that tweets something!” Yup, another device that tweets something. This time it’s a humidor and it tweets that status of it’s relative humidity and temperature levels. For cigar aficionados, this means a lot. In order to keep your cigars “fresh” for any amount of time over a few days, they must be contained in an environment that is controlled with the perfect amount of relative humidity and temperature levels. The purpose of this is so that your cigars don’t dry out or get too moist which would amount to a terrible smoking experience. The Tweetidor uses a digital precision relative humidity and temperature sensor (SHT75) along with the arduino.

Stats and the tweetin’ here…

Mains AC: non-invasive measuring

adafruit — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:00:31 +0000

Mains AC: non-invasive measuring @ OpenEnergyMonitor…

This method of measuring mains AC electrical energy use is quite nice, it doesn’t require any breaking of the mains wire, which makes it much safer, you just clip-on to the wire a sensor called a current transformer (CT) that measures the current flowing through either the live or neutral mains wire. It does this by measuring the magnetic field that surrounds the wire, created by the current. The simplicity of just clipping on the sensor means that it can be used to measure the electrical energy used by the whole house. It is the method used by many commercial devices that you can buy.

I don’t have much knowledge of how the commercial devices work apart from the use of the CT sensor, I couldn’t find much information on them and so the following is what I have managed to get to work in quite an experimental way. The results seem promising and useful, there are probably better more accurate ways of doing it and so hopefully it will improve over time but this is how far I have got so far.

Tweet-a-watt in Popular Science, August 2009

adafruit — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:16:05 +0000

Tweet-a-watt makes it to Popular Science, August issue, page 64 – Kit of the month!

EnBW is Stromzähler twitter

adafruit — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 14:36:41 +0000

A German power company is having their power meters Twitter, what a great idea

Translated version….

Unusual distribution Offensive: The supplier EnBW wants its future electricity can twitter. Kunden sollen so genau über den eigenen Verbrauch informiert werden – und damit Energie sparen. Customers should be as accurate about their own consumption to be informed – and thus save energy. Hamburg – Das Unternehmen Yello Strom, eine hundertprozentige Tochter des Energiekonzerns EnBW Hamburg – The company Yello Strom, a wholly owned subsidiary of energy group EnBW , will seine Stromzähler künftig Twitter-fähig machen. , Wants its future electricity Twitter compatible. The gauges could be the consumption of individual customers by the minute on the internet.

Customer service on all channels “We have taken the first twitternde prototype developed and tested successfully,” said Yello current boss Martin Vesper SPIEGEL ONLINE. Was letztlich dazu führt, dass der Zähler eine Nachricht twittert, steht noch zur Diskussion. What ultimately leads to the counter a message twittert, is still under discussion. Vieles sei aber denkbar. Much, however, conceivable. So könnten beispielsweise unregelmäßig hohe Ausschläge beim Verbrauch einen Tweet an den Kunden auslösen. For example, the irregular high rashes consumers Tweet trigger to the customer. Or the counter chirped once daily for a summary of the costs.

Thanks Toxin20!

Want to build your own?

Hawthorne effect for running, power consumption and more…

adafruit — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:00:57 +0000

Hawthorne effect with personal metrics / Nike+ via Waxy.

The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied not in response to any particular experimental manipulation.

One thing we noticed here at Adafruit – once we started measuring our power usage with the Tweet-a-watt project we actually decreased power consumption – part of it was because we knew we were measuring it and each month when the power bill came we saw the bill go down.

EnergyLogger – Nice Tweet-a-Watt add-on!

adafruit — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:05:43 +0000

EnergyLogger – Nice Tweet-a-Watt add-on!

EnergyLogger is a simple, native, cross-platform application designed to take the place of the Python scripts developed for the original Tweet-A-Watt project. By providing a user-friendly GUI interface for monitoring and logging data from these wireless enabled meters, we hope to remove one of the barriers to entry when implementing this project for yourself.

In addition to tweeting daily usage statistics, EnergyLogger is able to:

Log interval data to a CSV text file,

Upload interval data using Google’s Data API protocol to a Google Doc spreadsheet for analysis by other Google Apps or for use by Google PowerMeter,

Monitor energy usage and raise an alarm when load remains outside upper or lower limits for a user specified amount of time,

and “Tweet” these alarms to a user’s Twitter account.

The data files created by EnergyLogger can be imported directly into EnergyProbe, our flagship energy analysis software delivering an inexpensive, powerful, wireless solution to record, understand and interpret energy usage which had previously cost many thousands of dollars.

The 802.15 wireless standard implemented in the XBee radios allows EnergyLogger to monitor up to sixteen separate Kill-A-Watt meters simultaneously. Data is collected approximately every 2 seconds, processed, logged and uploaded at user defined intervals.

The interface is simple to navigate, provides all the pertinent information at a glance and can be made to disappear into the system tray or menu bar, doing it’s job in the background while your computer is free to do other tasks.

Kill a watt – $15…

adafruit — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:36:30 +0000

Newegg.com has P3 Kill A Watt Electricity load meter and monitors for $14.99 – we use these for the Tweet-a-watt kit, so if you’re looking to get a good deal $14.99 is really good!

The starter pack contains:

2 XBee modules (one for receiver, one for transmitter)
2 XBee adapter kits (ditto)
1 USB FTDI cable (for updating, configuring and receiving data from XBee)
1 bag of parts including 10,000uF capacitor, 220uF capacitor, 2 1% 10K resistors, 2 1% 4.7K resistors, 5mm green LED, 6″ rainbow ribbon cable, and 2 pieces of 1/8″ and 1/16″ heatshrink

CE smart grid using Tweet-a-watt

adafruit — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:06:08 +0000

This is interesting…

The CE Smart Grid in Jackson Michigan is home of Consumers Energy’s Smart Grid and Meter Test Farm. This site will receive responses from the meter groups updating their status real time.

They’re using the Tweet-a-watt!

Tweet-a-watt in the news…

adafruit — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:05:07 +0000

The little power tweeter is making the engineering rounds…

MAKE Volume 18: ReMake America

ReMake America! These challenging times have presented us with a rare chance to try out new ways of doing things. The opportunities for makers are terrific — we can start at home to remake manufacturing, education, food production, transportation, and recreation. In this volume you’ll learn how to make an automatic garden, heat your water with the sun, monitor and share your home energy usage, and more in MAKE Vol 18.

Tweet-a-Watt Successfully Combines Personal Fabrication, Social Messaging, and Green Electronics by Matthew Traum @ Design News.

…the Tweet-a-Watt, monitors and reports energy consumed by appliances and electronics plugged into it. As reported in “Show of Power” in Mechanical Engineering Magazine, electricity from a capacitor runs an embedded XBee wireless module within the Tweet-a-Watt just long enough to send daily data through a computer to the Internet. There a social messaging service like Twitter displays the results.

In his 2005 book “FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop – From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication” Neil Gershenfeld describes the future of engineering design as moving away from mass production to personal fabrication. According to Gershenfeld, driven by the desire for personalized products, people will begin modifying technology by adapting commercial products for unique personal applications. A look at the Adafruit Industries Web site suggests the first wave of Gershenfeld’s personal fabrication future is already here.

SHOW OF POWER by Jeffrey Winters @ Mechanical Engineering magazine, ASME Int’l (the American Society of Mechanical Engineers).

For most people, the only time they are aware of their power consumption is when the utility bill arrives. Then, it’s tidily totaled for the month. But a gadget that would enable users to publish their daily electricity usage won a green industrial design competition in February…

Kits available!

Google powermeter…

adafruit — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:47:54 +0000

About a month after we released the Tweet-a-watt project Google announced their power meter press/info site for the Google Powermeter, a lot of folks email us each week asking if Tweet-a-watt works with Google Power meter, we do not know. We applied to their program for smart meters a couple months ago and received this auto-responder today (see below).

If anyone works with the Google powermeter and has Tweet-a-watt working please let us know a lot of power company start ups bought the kit so we’re pretty sure someone is doing something cool

The Tweet-a-watt project will be in MAKE 18, it’s open source and uses Google’s app engine for graphing (and of course Twitter for tweets).

Thank you for your interest in Google PowerMeter. We’ve reviewed all of the submissions we received since our announcement. We’ve been very pleased to receive so many inquiries about our gadget and how we can collaborate with device manufacturers. Our goal is to enable devices to easily integrate with Google PowerMeter using our API. At the moment, we’re working hard developing the API with our utility partners but we don’t have detailed specifications for it yet. When we release the Google PowerMeter API, we hope that you will review the specifications to evaluate integrating your product with the API.

We’ve provided a bit more detail on the API on our FAQs page: http://www.google.org/powermeter/faqs.html

To keep up to date on developments related to Google PowerMeter or our energy information efforts, please join our Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/energyinformation?lnk=srg&hl=en

Thanks,
Google PowerMeter Team

OurWatts.com – Graphs of Tweeted Energy Data

adafruit — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:01:00 +0000

Lots of Tweet-a-watts… OurWatts.com graphs energy data tweeted by Tweet-a-Watts other folks have made!… This is so cool! Via Ourwatts on Twitter!

Information feeds are one piece of the ubiquitous computing puzzle

adafruit — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:44:30 +0000

Tweet-a-watt mention at EDN’s POWERSOURCE by Margery Conner…

In the world model of ubiquitous computing, aka, “Things that think,” significant physical objects have intelligence, temporary storage, sensing components, and often form computing networks. These wireless sensor networks are usually pretty sophisticated: One popular networking protocol is Zigbee, based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard…

However, I’m seeing another approach to communications for these proliferating objects that are just so eager to talk with something: Twitter feeds. You’re probably familiar with Twitter, the micro-blogging platform that constrains posters to a brusque 140-character limit. It’s a simple yet robust method for posting 140 characters in a stream out to the world for online monitoring. Less well-known is that Twitter has a search function that’s much closer to monitoring information in real-time than Google’s search, and no wonder, since Twitter’s searchable content is a fraction of the size of the HTML pages Google attempts to keep up to date…

Just a quick note to add – Twitter is a cheap/easy/free SMS gateway, super simple for notification services for devices – it’s also fun for folks to build projects like Tweet-a-watt and show the results to their friends (or anyone else).

tweetawatt – Twitter search

adafruit — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 04:00:14 +0000

As folks get their Tweet-a-Watt kits working you can see them come online with their power usage @ Twitter’s search – fun stuff!

HOW TO – Using the Tweet-a-watt with Pachube.com

adafruit — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:36:41 +0000

Naughtorious shows you how to use the Tweet-a-Watt with Pachube via Pachube’s tweet…

This project involved hacking a common Kill-a-Watt power meter to transmit data wirelessly usign an Xbee to my computer (Mac), and then upload the data to two different websites (Pachube.com & Google App Engine) to display graphically…

A much simpler and more useful alternative to plotting with Google is to use Pachube. Pachube allows you to upload your live data and share it with others. Likewise, you can use other people’s data feeds to control something locally or use many feeds to make composite plots, etc. The data is submitted using a fairly simple protocol called Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) which you can learn about at Pachube.

To upload my data, I used one of the basic python scripts available on ladyada’s site and modified it to send the data tagged in EEML using this python library python-eeml from petervizi. Here is my resulting Pachube data feed and a Flash plot…

Tweet-a-watt wins “Best of Green: Science & Technology – Best gadget hack!”

adafruit — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 04:00:52 +0000

Some nice news on our little twittering power meter project – it won Tweet-a-watt wins “Best of Green: Science & Technology – Best gadget hack!” via MAKE.

Tweet-a-Watt is taking the trophy here. There are hacks to make things efficient, to run them on renewable energy, to make them accomplish green tasks. But one thing we love is the spark of competition to get more efficient. Tweet-a-Watt is riding the wave of the social media phenomenon and the rising awareness of efficiency among a demographic that can make the biggest difference when they adjust their habits. Those are some magic ingredients, and makes this DIY hack a winner.–J.H

More:
Make: Online wins Treehugger Award!

Hacking the ASUS router for the Tweet-a-Watt

adafruit — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 18:03:12 +0000

Using mightyohm’s tutorial to hack the ASUS router for use with the Tweet-a-watt – you don’t need a computer to report your power usage, just a hacked up Wi-Fi router (m4v).

Related:

The Tweet-a-Watt kit is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data. This pack contains nearly everything* necessary to build a single outlet monitor and receiver. To monitor additional outlets, you will need an add-on transmitter pack. One outlet can monitor up to 1500 Watts.

Tweet-a-Watt kits now available…

adafruit — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:12:19 +0000

Tweet-a-Watt kits are now available! A few months ago, using “off-the-shelf hardware”, we modified a Kill-a-Watt(TM) power meter to “tweet” (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed to the user’s Twitter account (Cumulative Killowatt-hours). We released this project as an “Open source hardware” project – in other words, anyone can make these, modify them and make a commercial product from the ideas and methods.

After we released this project we entered it in the Greener Gadgets design contest and won first place, we donate the winnings to “Engineers without borders“.

You can see the “Tweetawatt” account on twitter here!

Here’s how it works, the modified Kill-a-Watt uses a “super-cap” to slowly recharge itself, once there is enough power it turns on the Xbee wireless module which transmits the data to a nearby computer (or internet connected microcontroller, like an Arduino) once the power usage for the day is recorded it uses a predefined Twitter account (it can be your own) to publish your daily KWH consumption for the day, multiple units can be used for an entire household.

Energy change and consumption can happen many ways, we feel there is a social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH – by sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter users can compete for the lowest numbers and also see how they’re doing compared to their friends and followers. Our system can work with twitter, google app engine or really… anything that can display data.

We also wanted to make it easy for anyone to build these so we have released a kit based on the inquires and demand – you don’t need to be a venture backed company or a giant company with millions of dollars to make your own low cost home power monitoring system.

Please note Kill-a-Watt(TM) power meters are not included, you can get these just about anywhere for less than $20.

We have two versions of the kits…

Tweet-a-Watt starter pack

The starter pack contains:

2 XBee modules (one for receiver, one for transmitter)
2 XBee adapter kits (ditto)
1 USB FTDI cable (for updating, configuring and receiving data from XBee)
1 bag of parts including 10,000uF capacitor, 220uF capacitor, 2 1% 10K resistors, 2 1% 4.7K resistors, 5mm green LED, 6″ rainbow ribbon cable, and 2 pieces of 1/8″ and 1/16″ heatshrink

In stock now at the Adafruit store…

Tweet-a-Watt add-on outlet kit

This pack contains parts to make an additional outlet for your Tweet-a-Watt setup.

Included is:

XBee module
XBee adapter kit
Bag of parts including 10,000uF capacitor, 220uF capacitor, 2 1% 10K resistors, 2 1% 4.7K resistors, 5mm green LED, 6″ rainbow ribbon cable, and 2 pieces of 1/8″ and 1/16″ heatshrink

Tweet-a-Watt kits are now available in the Adafruit store.

Tweet-a-Watt (wattcher) part #4 – visualizations

ladyada — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:08:17 +0000

Time for part 4 of the tweet-a-watt (the project formally known as ‘wattcher’) design documentation! In this section, we play with the Google visualization widgets to save us lots of time. I will show you how to take data from the Google App Engine datastore, turn it into JSON and then make it visualization-happy for nice Flash graphs. The code is also fully available in a google code repository so hopefully people with better software skillz than I can submit patches and help out.

“Twitter your energy footprint” on CNN

adafruit — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:33:32 +0000

Video of “Twitter your energy footprint” on CNN with Poppy Harlow.

Tweetin’ the Watts at Greener Gadgets today

ladyada — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:37:34 +0000

The tweet-a-watt, an entry in the Greener Gadgets competition, is hard at work doin’ its thing. If you’re at the event, or planning to show up, you can check it out in person!

Tweet-a-Watt on Attack of the Show (video)

ladyada — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:07:17 +0000

Effervescent John Park did a great job showing off a Tweet-a-Watt we sent him. Now he -has- to build one!

…and tomorrow we’ll be showing off a live demo of the system at Greener Gadgets in NYC.

Wattcher! For when you want to watch your Watts

ladyada — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 01:49:07 +0000

(Last week, Phil T. & I entered our prototype networked power meter “Tweet-a-watt” into the Greener Gadget competition here in New York. After much demand for how to do such a thing, I’ve decided to post up this work in progress)

This project documents my adventures in learning how to wire up my home for wireless power monitoring. I live in a rented apartment so I don’t have hacking-access to a meter or breaker panel. Since I’m still very interested in measuring my power usage on a long term basis, I will build wireless outlet reporters. Building your own power monitor isn’t too tough and can save money but I’m not a fan of sticking my fingers into 120V power. Instead, I’ll build on the existing Kill-a-watt power monitor, which works great and is available at my local hardware store.

My plan is to have each room connected to a 6-outlet power strip which powers all the devices in that room (each kill-a-watt can measure up to 15A, or about 1800W, which is plenty!). That way I can track room-by-room usage, for example “kitchen”, “bedroom”, “workbench”, and “office”.

This project will show how to:

snag data from a Kill-a-Watt power meter
use an XBee to read analog sensor data remotely
put XBees into low power sleep mode
have multiple sensors transmit to one receiver
parse XBee sensor data using python on a home computer and/or an Arduino-type thing
utilize Google App Engine ‘cloud computing’ to store that data and display it for later analysis

So far I’ve uploaded the first section which goes through the hardware steps of wireless-izing a Kill-a-Watt with an XBee modem!