The tweeting house
My first ‘experiment’ was done in a couple of hours on Friday night. I can’t even call it an app, since I didn’t write a single line of code for it. Here it is:
I’ve made my house tweet it’s energy usage! I wanted to take some invisible data from my home and find a way of showing it to myself unobtrusively. This isn’t the most ideal format, but it was quick and simple to create and will let me know if this is interesting and worth pursuing or if I should try something else.
How it Works
It’s made entirely from existing software, web services and some internet ductape, as follows:
- A Current Cost monitors the current in the cables entering my electricity meter
- CC outputs XML consumption data over a serial cable
- Gets read by a Processing app
- Uploads to pachube (sensor logging & sharing site)
- Exports as JSON
- into a Yahoo! Pipe that outputs RSS
- TwitterFeed pushes RSS to..
- Twitter!
Looking back perhaps writing some custom code would have been simpler! I think I’ll carry on by making the tweets more legible, with per day energy usage and comparison of if this is above or below previous usage.
Since Friday I’ve been tinkering with my new Arduino at BarCampBournemouth, hopefully there will be something to show for that soon.
