Smart Planet from the grassroots: HomeCamp

For some reason I didn’t post this at the time. I think I meant to clean it up first. But it seems pretty solid, so what the hey…  There are other better write ups out there, but this was my first take.

Imperial College on a Saturday morning. That in itself is unusual. Being a family man I normally don’t “do” weekends if I can help it. But the event was HomeCamp – driven by my very good friend Chris Dalby aka Yellowpark. The idea of HomeCamp is to bring together interested parties to work on Demand Response, cutting your demand for energy by better understanding your consumption profiles.

Andy Stanford Clark, IBM Master Inventor and Llama Lover, was one of the driving forces behind the emergence of the HomeCamp community cluster. He credits IBM’s previous CEO Lou Gerstner for the vision of a billion people talking to a trillion devices and a million e-businesses. But says the vision doesn’t go far anough

low bandwidth high cost – MQTT microbroker. 2MB. plotting cheese resistivity. “no self respecting mouse would eat that.” they prefer the crocodile

Now IBM has the nanobroker- instead now called Really Simple Message Broker- c code.

“started with oil pipeline monitoring. then moved into utilities. we did a project with Enron just before they went off to prison”

the small stuff adds up – the long tail of electricity consumption

just by turning off the kitchen lights we cut my consumption by a third. but his son said :how much energy are you using monitoring your energy usage.

Current Cost is in Andover – a clamp with a transmitter, and a base station.

Andy’s suggestion was add a serial port to it. CurrentCost said why. Andy persuaded them…

heralding the era of low power devices a 50 pound linux based slug – no disc. %+4 W

now the viglen MPC– as in the ubuntu uk podcast. andy has consolidated the entire home automation system to one 10W device. IBMers call the MPC a “slug”.

back to andy_house. using x10 – control signals around existing wiring of the house. you can turn on or off. there is a thing in home automation called SAF – spouse approval factor. Very important!!!!!!!!!!

Building a better mousetrap.
generating a mouse event.

So while Andy might have started his journey under Gerstner he is finally finding his way under Palmisano. Smarter Planet, from the grassroots, the instrumented everything world, home automation dorks downloading microbrokers from IBM Alphaworks, the creation of a Smarter Planet from the roots up.

I. Am. All. About. That. The next HomeCamp will be in April2009.

disclosure IBM is a client, but this is nothing to do with that.