Benjamin Ellis

CurrentCost Graphs – Monitoring Home Power

It might not look like it, but that is a wondrous thing. It represents the next step in home hacking with the current cost meter. It is a lead which connects the current cost meter to the serial port on a lower power PC that runs a simple Perl script that records our power usage. The PC runs a script that captures the information from the current cost meter (current power used, in Watts, and temperature in ‘C) and build pretty graphs that are then published on a local web server.

Here are some of the useful resources I used to get it done:

• This original post from jibble.org: making graphs using the current cost device.
• Crouching Badger’s experiences with the USB version of the cable with links to a simple perl script.

The Jibble post got me started, although not being a PERL programmer or RRD user meant some of the “easy to make” changes weren’t actually that “easy to make”. Having learnt RRD a bit more, I’m impressed with it – great for performance monitoring of all sorts of thigns. It will take something more to move me to PERL as a programming language – PHP is as non-visual as I’m going to get. Some other pointers that helped (and give you an idea what it is all about):

• Dale Lane has done a fair bit – it was good to meet him at HomeCamp (I like Dale’s daily electricity bill too – I’ve build something similar, but taking the Kilowatt hours figure from the Current Cost Meter).
• Likewise Nicholas O’Leary has a series of posts.
• There is also a Google code repository.
• Ben Smithurst’s posts were also very helpful – a full script that updates rrd and an sqlite database too.

A slight warning: the commonly used PERL script fails when the temperature goes bellow 10′C though (since the current cost prints a leading space then, which causes the perl string matching clause to barf) – keep your current cost warm or fix up the script ;).

I have been amazed at the power of measuring usage in changing behaviours. Measuring really is the first step to managing. Even more excitingly, I have noticed that my gas meter is readable (via a magnetic or optical sensor) so I should be able to track that too soon – as if I’m not driving the family crazy already. Here’s a day of our electricity use (with min, max and average power):

Matterbox

It’s nice to get a surprise, and it is also nice to get something you’ve been waiting for. The Matter Box that arrived through the post yesterday was a bit of both. I got an email saying it would be with me, then one saying it would be delayed.

Oh the suspense! Well managed communications though – a general note: if you are going to be late with something, let people know. Much better than letting people down. Well done Matter.

The general idea behind Matter Box is best explained by Matter themselves:

Matter is a new and innovative way for companies to talk to people by giving you real, physical stuff – things to hold in your hands, keep in your drawer, or give to your friends.

In a digital age, we want to bring companies and people together around real, physical things

I like the sentiment. As much as I am a massive on-line advocate, real physical stuff trumps the on-line world anytime. 

It isn’t easy to show in a picture, so let me list what was in the box:

• Cadbury Cranberry & Granola Bar
• BBC Audio Comedy sampler
• Original Source Orange Oil & Ginger hair and body wash
• LOVEFiLM DVD cleaning cloth and a month’s movies
• O2 sim card pack
• Pimm’s, Baileys, Bell’s & Gordon’s winter drinks pack - recipes and ‘roaring fire’ DVD
• Sampler of ‘Let Battle Commence’ by Conn Iggulden / Harper Collins.

Messing with Flock

I’ve started using Flock for my ‘social browsing’ – it integrates nicely with many of the services I use (WordPress, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook). This labeled screen shot from the Flock folks gives an idea of what it can do – and this post was edited and posted via Flock too…

Tags: flock

T-Shirt with built in Wi-Fi Detector

So, you are wondering how to find the nearest hotspot? This one spotted via an article on The Register:

Get yourself one of these, for a mere £20 or so:

A Wi-Fi Detecting T-Shirt

How could we have survived all this time without one? Of course, you could always put that money towards a month or two of 3G service. I still can’t seem to find a hotspot when I need one!

Nabaztag Rabbits – Hopping Mad

Ah… the Nabaztag Rabbit. I’d forgotten how badly I needed one of these until I saw a post on Girly Geekdom that reminded me about them. The Nabaztag (Armenia for rabbit apparently) is a cute looking WiFi enabled smart device, which has recently been updated with lots of new capabilities. It can indicate the status of pretty much anything by moving or wiggling its ears. It can also read (speech to text) and listen (speech to text). It has a flashing tummy as well. What more could you want? Oh, ok. It has an RFID now reader too… Shame the website is such a slush of flash, I would love to just get a speck sheet!

We will see a lot more intelligent devices as the underlying technology gets cheaper and more compact – increasingly these kind of devices can be build with a single chip. It is a much faster way of checking your email that firing up your PC to find nothing is there, apart from the usual SPAM of course!

Just When I Thought I’d Got All The Gadgets I Needed – Along Come 3D Monitors!

I’ve been a long-time fan of the Quiet PC folks, from the days when they were based down the road. However, I’m in a bad mood with them now, as they just emailed me details of the Zalman 2D/3D monitors. You need the appropriate 3D glass and nVidia card (and not Windows Vista as the drivers are XP only right now). It is almost enough to make me fire up the old PC instead of the Mac, almost.