RSSTweet-a-Watt Power Monitor
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18: ReMake America, Page 112.
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Subscribers—read this article now in your digital edition!Build a wireless electricity monitor for about $50, and twitter your kilowatts.
By Limor Fried, Phillip Torrone
Illustrations by Tim Lillis
We live in a rented apartment, so we don’t have hacking access to a power meter or breaker panel. But we still wanted to measure our household power usage long-term, so we developed the Tweet-a-Watt. It uses plug-in electricity monitors at each outlet to wirelessly send readings to a base station, which assembles them into reports you can analyze and graph. It can also broadcast updates via Twitter.
Building your own power monitor isn’t too tough and can save money, but we’re not fans of sticking our fingers into 120V wiring. Instead, we built on top of a P3 Kill A Watt power monitor, which we found at the local hardware store.
To track usage room by room, for example "kitchen," "bedroom," "workbench," and "office," you can use a 6-outlet power strip in each room to feed all the room's devices through a shared monitor. Each Kill A Watt can measure up to 15 amps, or about 1,800 watts, which is plenty for any normal room.
You can build each wireless outlet monitor for about $50 with a few easily available electronic parts and light soldering, and about the same for the receiver. No microcontroller programming or high voltage engineering is necessary!
To read more, please download the PDF
Links
- Download and install Python
- Tweet-a-Watt code bundle (zip 16.5 KB)
- Schematic diagram
- Python programming language: Free online tutorials
- Twitter API wiki
- Limor’s original Tweet-a-Watt tutorial
- Tweet-a-Watt Twitter account
- Tweet-a-Watt GAE web app
- NumPy and PyLab at Scientific Tools for Python
- matplotlib: a python 2D plotting library
- wxPython: free Python graphing module
- Sign up for a Twitter account
- X-CTU software
- Maker Shed
- Adafruit Industries
Make: Noise — Discuss this article
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Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.
- Need help?
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The tweet-a-watt support forum is at ladyada.net
Please visit http://forums.ladyada.net/viewforum.php?f=40 for help, advice, updates, support and more
Thanks!
LimorPosted by ladyada on June 08, 2009 at 11:14:37 Pacific Time
- my kill a watt has no op amp ic
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Just received my kill a watt and opened it up. there is no ic to which i can connect the required leads!! Instead it looks like there are four transistors. Can I still make it work?Posted by osoraku nakamori on May 28, 2009 at 21:04:32 Pacific Time
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