Make’s Phil Torrone entered this odd gadget, the Tweet-a-Watt, in the Green Gadgets design competition. It’s essentially a Kill-a-Watt with a capacitor and transmitter added that will Tweet your current power usage using a nearby computer or wireless Arduino mini PC.
Phil powered the transmitter using a large capacitor that charges, transmits, and then discharges over time. They then used an XBee module to transmit the information read by the Kill-a-Watt, giving you an up-to-the-minute reading of your energy usage.
The kit is going open source shortly so you can make your own.
We’re publishing the source, schematics and the idea for others to run with – Energy change and consumption can happen many ways, we feel there is a social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH – by sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter users can compete for the lowest numbers and also see how they’re doing compared to their friends and followers.
Just a thought – If you weren’t rigging up a kill-a-watt to send info to a computer to tweet your energy consumption, you may reach your low energy usage goal…
this is a project from limor fried (adafruit.com) and myself – @pji — the goal is to inspire makers and some device manufacturers to report power usage, sometimes it could be socially (twitter) other times is could be displayed – the data will be on twitter, wattzon and likely other places, this is a glimpse of what will likely be common in just a few years, our houses and apartments will publish what we use and we can all try to work towards lowering our usage by setting goals.
the device does not need a computer you can use a micro-controller…