A lot of folks emailed me about our “Not New Year’s resolutions – What are you going to MAKE? What we are making…” How many startups and projects are going to be doing power usage and metering in 2009? TONS – and now many of them seem to be looking at Twitter to pass the information along too.
Here’s the latest, we’re using a supercap, the Xbee is still parasitic (getting its power from the Kill-a-Watt). This is the one time that a supercap is actually reasonable for use in a project, a rare & very short burst of activity followed by long sleep delays. A supercap is like something between capacitors and batteries.
Oh, here’s the outline of the project…
Twittering power usage device
Limor Fried and I are working on a cool project that should be done in early 2009, you take an off the shelf power usage device like the Kill-a-Watt and add an Xbee wireless module – once tapped in to the Kill-a-Watt you transmit the power usage to a local computer and that computer publishes how many watts per day you’re using to your twitter account and will also add something like #mywatts so everyone can compare what they use. You could also use an Arduino with ethernet or wireless and eliminate the computer completely. The project will be open source of course and we expect someone will see it and do a commercial product.
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