Gecko Biloba
INTRODUCTION:
As a hackerspace, our power consumption is an indicator of something being made. While people work on cool stuff , we want to track our electrical meter and keeping an eye on our power consumption and thus monthly expenses. Unfortunately, we still have an old analogue meter and we only habe limited access to the basement, where the meter is.
So our RasPowermeter project was born out of pure necessety and the Hackaday WorldCreateDay 2018 was just the initial catalysator to realize it finally.
GOAL(S):
So here it is, our quick-n-dirty prototype, v0.1 WorldCreateDay2018 revision. It will be usefull for us to save money (+$$$) that will actually enable us to make more awesome projects in Krautspace. But we also want to share it with all of you out there, who also just have an anlogue meter or don't want to have a "smart meter". So we are building it collectively with people in Krautspace and hopefully with people out there, like you! This is why we are putting our creations under an open-source licence.
And as a sideeffect, we will even do something for the environment by saving power by finding used devices still draining power.
WORK over Time = POWER(meter):
This project sounds small, but all projects will grow, and grow and grow. We expect it to be like this also for our RasPowermeter. That is why v0.1 was just equipped with an RPR220 sensor to read out the turning wheel as an indicator for the current power situation (you will find a sketch how to do your own one down below). It took us already the full evening to discuss what to do, to build it, and to test it attached to our power meter.
The next days, we had build a cardboard camera mount for our IR raspi cam and both, the camera and the sensor are recording the first data. So the next steps will be this (but not exclusively these):
- creating a week full of measurments
- writing an analysis tool to convert the turning wheel data to Power and another tool to readout the digits from the analogue display
- improvement of the camera mount
- storing the data to a database
- data transfer to the Krautspace server 2 floors above.
- displaying the data on graphs on a "kiosk" display for everyone to see the current situation
- document
- celebration!
- repeating the previous steps with the next iteration of improvements
REACTIONS:
We would like you to tell us what you would like the RasPowermeter to be ablt to do! What feature do you urgently need! What data should we be careful with, and what fun thing could we do? Please tell us in the comments below or via our Twitter (https://twitter.com/RasPowermeter)
Hi Badr, thank you for your nice words. :) We are building it, because we need it and to avoid climbing the stairs too often. And we know we will help others out there to have their personal "smart meter", then it is another drive for us. And the best thing, you can control your data.
So let's see how far we can go and what crazy idea we will get during the path! :)