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

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.

Locate Meters		Collect the Gear
Mount the Cameras		Set Up Hardware
Configure Android and Flickr with MOTO AHEM		Tag Images in Flickr
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.