Mark’s use of energy@home highlights a need for annotation function but before getting to that stage I want to customize the way historical data is retrieved.

Currently it only shows pre-set number of settings but I face a UI challenge to make it simple to use yet powerful enough to allow multiple overlays and graph settings and types.

As a prototype I have removed the pre-set intervals and replaced it with a textbox and the unit entered in the textbox. Whilst this works well it does not full fill my desire to allow more than one overlay. Also there is no min or max range so someone can crash the browser if they enter a high value with loads of data point e.g 99 hours. Whilst Flot may cope with large sets of data, it makes the point hover very hard and the resolution looks really bad. The flip side to this effect is that the zoom feature gives more data points.

Watts Clever Fridge + Freezer Power Anomaly

I have been in contact with Mark on my energy@home project and found Mark’s website which led me to a disappointing discovery – bug in the CurrentCost device.

Whilst it has not affected me yet it is somewhat disconcerning that the bug has existed over 2 generation of a product and still remains unfixed by the manufacturer.

The bug happens when multiple sensors are connected and the watts go over 3kW on either 2nd or 3rd channel. Whilst I am only using one sensor currently I was hoping the IAM sensors due to be released by CurrentCost won’t be affected. The pessimist I am I somehow doubt it if I hooked it up to a 3kW+ appliance e.g kettle.

Fridge/Freezer Anomaly Explained (Probably)

I have just published version 0.4 of energy@home. It includes Twitter integration and a new graph which shows how much energy was used for each hour of the day.

energy@home project page

A preview of my part time project energy@home with Twitter integration.

As you can see the value for total energy used is currently way off but it’s a preview of what’s to come.

There are two options: tweet hourly summary and daily summary. These can be turned on and off. I am using python-twitter library which does not use oauth authentication so the client description comes up as API which is not nice.

It’s been a while since I have mentioned the project energy@home I have been working on so I thought I’d share the latest picture of what it looks like.

I will soon be tagging and release a new version with the major difference form 0.3 is triggers. Triggers allows data only to be captured if certain conditions are met or exceeded. This saves saving data which has not changed much.

Next step is to get pre-triggering working where if a trigger condition is met then the data leading up to the trigger event gets logged and certain amount of data is stored after the trigger. This allows a user to view data leading up to the event, the event itself which caused the trigger and the leading data after the event.

Improvements to the UI is needed to. I would like the graph settings to be more customizable and get the data table to work so users can inspect the raw values for themselves.

Special thanks goes to Chris Noon for data acquisition techniques which lead me to using triggers.

energy@home project page