hack-a-watt - a homemade HAN testbed on a shoestring
Finally, I get to do a technology post!
A while back, a colleague was telling me about their interest in prototyping some HAN (Home Automation Network) concepts as quickly and easily as possible. As a control guy, that got me thinking about the simplest sensor-controller-actuator I could configure. The Kill-a-Watt can measure power consumption, but is fairly useless as a sensor that integrates into a controller. However, a little web searching uncovered twittering-kill-a-watt, showing you how to graft an XBEE radio on your device. On the actuator side, you've got x10, which gives you the software controlled switches, as well as a PC program to control them.
Now the missing piece is interfacing the sensor and control. Amazingly enough, there seems to be an API out there for the X10. I know very little about XBEE, but it seems to be a standard implementation of ZigBee, and I didn't have any troubling finding open-source toolkits out there. So there it is ... Less than $100 in HW, and a little soldering, and you can cycle your Fridge compressor off when your dishwasher goes onto 'dry' cycle, dropping peak load by an imperceptible amount.
A while back, a colleague was telling me about their interest in prototyping some HAN (Home Automation Network) concepts as quickly and easily as possible. As a control guy, that got me thinking about the simplest sensor-controller-actuator I could configure. The Kill-a-Watt can measure power consumption, but is fairly useless as a sensor that integrates into a controller. However, a little web searching uncovered twittering-kill-a-watt, showing you how to graft an XBEE radio on your device. On the actuator side, you've got x10, which gives you the software controlled switches, as well as a PC program to control them.
Now the missing piece is interfacing the sensor and control. Amazingly enough, there seems to be an API out there for the X10. I know very little about XBEE, but it seems to be a standard implementation of ZigBee, and I didn't have any troubling finding open-source toolkits out there. So there it is ... Less than $100 in HW, and a little soldering, and you can cycle your Fridge compressor off when your dishwasher goes onto 'dry' cycle, dropping peak load by an imperceptible amount.
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