May 30, 2008

Would You Like More Control Over Your Electricity Usage?

For a while now I've been wondering about how to green our homes. Over on the company blog I've just announced the Mazzini Project, the latest idea along these lines that I've been playing around with.

It's a wireless power-monitor combined with a control unit so that as well as letting you know exactly how much electricity whatever is plugged into it is using, you can also turn it on and off remotely. I'm still just building the first prototype (I was wiring together circuits and measuring things with the multimeter just this afternoon) but I wanted to start talking about the idea to see what people thought.

I've put some slides together to try to explain it in more detail, so please have a look at them and let me know what you think. Is it a good idea? Would you buy one? How would you hack one to do things I haven't thought of?

If you want to see the slides full-screen, then you can do that from this page.

SlideShare | View | Upload your own

Tags:

Posted by Adrian at May 30, 2008 03:11 PM | TrackBack

This blog post is on the personal blog of Adrian McEwen. If you want to explore the site a bit further, it might be worth having a look at the most recent entries or look through the archives or categories over on the left.

You can receive updates whenever a new post is written by subscribing to the recent posts RSS feed or

Comments

Neat idea Adrian, Are you going to use the ethernet over power systems like PC World sells?

Posted by: Geoff at May 30, 2008 04:27 PM

Glad you like it. It'd mesh well with your recent investigations of your home's carbon footprint :-)

I'm not sure if it'll use powerline ethernet for the networking side of things. The prototype is using Bluetooth initially because my laptop already has it and Bluetooth Arduino boards are easy to get hold of. I've got a Zigbee shield for the Arduino too, so that's the current front-runner for the networking side of things, but once the basic functionality is up and running over Bluetooth I'll have a closer look at what would make most sense.

Posted by: Adrian at May 30, 2008 04:58 PM
Post a comment









Remember personal info?





Note: I'm running the MT-Keystrokes plugin to filter out spam comments, which unfortunately means you have to have Javascript turned on to be able to comment.