DIY Android Home Energy Monitor
Lately we’ve been tinkering with deploying Android beyond the phone (using Google’s open-source Android to connect devices to each other and the web), so we thought we’d see if we could leverage the efficiency of Android on a BeagleBoard, the accessibility of wireless webcams, and the ease of a Flickr feed to a custom Google Gadget to track the ups and downs of our metered utilities.
Why webcams? While there may be a few compelling (low-cost, low-impact) products out there to monitor your electric meter, there are no comparable products for reading gas or water meters.
So until the really smart grid arrives, here’s a way to chart your whole utility spend on your own Google homepage.
Home Energy Monitor Ecosystem
The MOTO DIY Android Home Energy Monitor (AHEM) utilizes an average wireless network. Wireless webcams take pictures of the ever-changing dials on the user’s utility meters. A BeagleBoard running Android and the MOTO AHEM custom applications push the pictures up to a Flickr photo set.
MOTO AHEM application prompts and transcribe numbers into your Flickr image tag. Saving the image spurs the MOTO Labs’ Google Gadget will automatically chart meter activity on the user’s Google home page.
The Essentials
Gather and/or purchase the following:
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For BeagleBoard setup:
Required software:
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System Diagram
Add a Tweet-A-Watt
Some of the folks at MAKE Magazine made a clever hack of the ubiquitous watt metering device, the Kill-A-Watt. Their Tweet-A-Watt lets you track consumption and measure efficiency on devices that are typical electricity hogs: air conditioning, washers, dryers, refrigerators.
We like the Tweet-A-Watt and we wanted to add it to our Google Gadget. So we leveraged the Tweet-A-Watt’s Python application to sit on the BeagleBoard’s linux layer, and added a Python interpreter on the BeagleBoard, then used a socket to communicate with our Android application for sending to Twitter. (We did this because Android does not support Python.)
Now we can track its activity and reporting on our homepage right alongside our whole-house utility chart.
Do it Yourself
Download detailed step-by-step instructions here.
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| Locate Meters | Collect the Gear | |
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| Mount the Cameras | Set Up Hardware | |
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| Configure Android and Flickr with MOTO AHEM | Tag Images in Flickr | |
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| Build and Set Up Tweet-A-Watt | Set Up MOTO Lab’s Google Gadget |
More Steps
- Definitely would prefer to utilize OCR so we can eliminiate the klugy transcription step. Anyone interested?
- More fun might be to hack the Black and Decker Power Meter to populate the MOTO Google Gadget.
Greater Context on Smart Grid
- You may have heard about the $4.5 billion the February stimulus package set aside for the build-out of our nation’s smart grid, but check out this description of billions more for associated technologies.
- A recent report by Deliotte predicted “that in 2009, SmartGrid companies may generate $25 billion in revenues, and represent the biggest and fastest growing sector in the GreenTech – possibly even the entire – technology market.”
- Read through a history of Earth2Tech’s editor Katie Fehrenbacher’s posts tagged “energy” and you’ll start to understand the players, the pace, and high stakes involved in this massive energy infrastructure upgrade. Check out also the archive of their recent GreenNet conference.
- It was Fehrenbacher’s survey piece on Energy Dashboards for the Home that tipped us over to this somewhat reactionary choice of webcams for our metering system.
- Energy pundit and engineer Saul Griffith’s Wattzon personal calculator tool might offer the smartest vision for a user experience that could fulfill this drive to know (and thus change) what we consume.
- Google Power Meter is the one to watch, of course. Read Google’s letter to the California Public Utilities Commission where they assert the public’s right to access personal real-time smart grid data.
- Saul Griffith’s sobering and very smart Climate Change Recalculated presentation depicts the challenge of the scale of infrastructure reorganization required to stymie the climate change snowball. Highly recommended.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:42 am
Very cool.
On your OCR question, there is some good stuff in a slashdot thread from 11/08: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/08/11/12/2054218/Saving-Energy-Via-Webcam-Based-Meter-Reading?art_pos=1
For instance, this could be a good start: http://www.eissq.com/DialADC.html
May 29th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
The power company will just *love* you mounting something like this on the box and obstructing the view of the meter reader.
May 29th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Do you still have to read your meter from the Flikr photo? If so it’s just as easy to have a pen and paper adjacent the meter and a spreadsheet on your PC. Low tech, low cost, not much to go wrong, anyone can do it and help save our planet.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
This is way stupid. I would reather have this monitor how many beers are left in my 1940s fridge. Whats the point? wow I know how much power my over sized Mc Mansion, Ya baby like I want less power? NOT and I don’t want to get charged carbon credits for using it. I’m already paying to much.
This is just another solution without reason, and what does this gadget run on? happy hippie thoughts and rainbows? No it runs on the power it’s watching making people use more power.
The only way to save power is not USE IT and unplug, nice try guys but the BIG G has enough of our info now, how about teaching people to say electricity by correcting power factor on their houses and saving real money.
May 31st, 2009 at 6:21 pm
I’ve had something like this running on my house for a while now. The link above shows you the graphs that I generate.
I’m lucky that my power meter flashes every 1/1000th of a kilowatt, so all I need is a photo sensor to catch my power “blips” as it were.
However all is not lost for you! You can avoid the OCR route(I’ll talk about that a bit later) the large wheel that denotes 1/1000th kilowatt hours has a black line scored into the front of it that can be measured with one of these: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/search/searchBrowseAction.html?method=getProduct&R=6276556
if you do want to go down the ocr route, then openCv is the library for you. It has python bindings (though on the beagle board, its probably much better to use the native C.) one way to improve the eissq.com workflow is to mask off the edge of the dials (so the text has been removed), you could then skip straight to the hough transform. as there is only one line (the needle) you should only get one result(!).
I have some photos of my setup, drop me an email if you want a look at the code/setup
June 1st, 2009 at 5:44 am
Anyone know which usb hub that is? I like how small it is.
June 1st, 2009 at 3:38 pm
You could used a relfective object sensor like the one used here http://community.pachube.com/node/65 that would be pretty quick for counting the turns of the electricity wheel.
June 8th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
could you post the URL to the beagle sw package with kernel and android rootfs? thanks!
June 11th, 2009 at 4:41 am
Hey there, link is fixed. Let us know how you experiment with it!
June 20th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Super! +a good description to help put it all together.
You must have plans for this, so here’s a prod:
put it up on Instructables.com soon.
And let all those folks who didn’t make it to Maker Faire have at it too.
January 9th, 2010 at 11:59 pm
I think It’s authentically an astonishing gadget to get in my collection. Does any person have aopinion where I can buy it? Any suggestions?
January 26th, 2010 at 3:58 am
The free energy devices have been suppressed by the corporate world, because such devices, would allow people to create their own energy for free, which would ultimately shut down the big energy corporations, because people won’t need to pay anymore for electricity to fill their pockets.
March 7th, 2010 at 6:05 pm
Interesting perspective on the new Android features. I never thought about it quite that way before. Go Androids!
April 24th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
I just wonder how the android detect the IP camera? Can anyone explain it? Thanks.