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As promised here's how to make your own Tweet-a-Watt, a twittering power meter that can show your friends, your followers and the world how much power you are (or are not) consuming. We entered this in the Green Gadgets design competition, wish us luck!
We're calling it "Wattcher" for now and some of the documentation is in progress - but a lot of people really really wanted to get started so we're posting everything up as we work on it...
Resources:
Wattcher start back (links on the left).
Make it!
Listen!
Resources
Downloads
This is an open source hardware project, anyone can make them - we've even heard from a few makers out there already that plan to make their own versions and sell them.
If I understand correctly, this device is designed to help you keep your electricity usage under control but requires a PC and a remote web-server (tweeter) to run continuously? Am I the only one who sees the irony here?
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@David - hi, i've heard this before (over and over) - the "idea" is that it will soon be possible and very likely for electronics to report their power usage - while it would be easier if they simply did not use electricity at all, at this time electronics require electricity to operate.
if you read the site and how-to, you don't need to use a computer, you can use a micro-controller.
this is a how-to and design to get folks started.
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Hey David,
The idea is to monitor your electrical usage. If you choose to monitor it to keep it under control that is one thing. Another use would be to see if an appliance or device is kicking on or off. Being able to do this remotely might be very helpful.
This is a great project with a lot of spiffy applications.
TBoy
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I get the point about monitoring electricity. What I don't get is the fashion for devices sending messages to twitter. The cognitive load required to process that information is just too much ('oh, another tweet saying 1217watts... is that good or bad? wait what was it before, huh is that because something is on just at this very moment or has it been bad for a while', etc etc etc etc)
Why not direct the data to pachube.com where it can be graphed over time, which is a whole lot more useful, and even relayed on further to other arduino type devices that could react to the energy monitoring device? It could catch on the same way Current Cost meters caught on on Pachube, because they released an application specially for it. (Pachube has been tweeting recently about a twitter app which seems to be able to do the opposite: send tweets to devices, rather than the other way round, which could also be interesting in this context: send a tweet back to tell it to switch off something!).
just my 2cents!
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