There has been a Groundswell building around the Current Cost meter, driven by the IBM Hursley messaging cluster, with distinguished inventor and Llama lover Andy Stanford-Clark as a driving force. His house twitters his energy and water consumption!
The electricity home hacking cluster has already been called out in a Guardian podcast by Jemima Kiss.
Anyway my mate Chris (the code brains behind our Twitter groups platform chinposin) has caught the bug. I have to say when Chris started downloading microbrokers from the WebSphereMQ emerging technology stable I knew things were more than afoot. And so….
We now plan to bring you HomeCamp. Lets hack that sucker. Or as Chris puts it:
Home Camp is an unconference about using technology to monitor and automate the home for greener resource use and to save costs.
Home Camp brings together anyone interested in monitoring and automation of the home using devices like Current Cost meters and RSMB. There is some great work being done, particulary with Current Cost meters, and Home Camp aims to build on the momentum of this work and help establish a community to continue to exchange new ideas, hacks and scripts.
With energy bills increasing and the cost of oil constantly up and down to eye watering levels, it is in all our interests to take a smarter and more up-to-date approach to managing our resource usage and impact.
A Current Cost meter is a device that can easily be used to monitor your electricity usage at home or anywhere you are using energy and requires no electrical expertise to install. Attaching a serial cable to a Current Cost and connecting to a computer, opens up the ability to get realtime and historical data regarding your energy usage, or the first step in a home automation system, or the first step to a twittering house. You can see a blog post about installing a Current Cost meter here.
We know the subject is hot – me and Tom have both got solid reviews for our Electricity 2.0 pitches at the O’Reilly Web2.0 Summits in New York and Berlin.
So see you at HomeCamp. Please put your name on the wiki.
Sean’s Mental Walkabout » Blog Archive » Links for October 31st says:
October 31, 2008 at 9:02 pm
[…] James Governor’s Monkchips » Home (automation) Camp November 29th 08Nifty. I wonder if there are Linux drivers for this yet. […]
Phoebe Bright says:
November 4, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Very interested in this topic and blogged about it a few months ago. http://pbjots.blogspot.com/2008/07/emergent-homes.html
Plan to come to homecamp and wonder if you have any info on people already doing projects with the current cost meter or other USB linked meters?
Smart Planet « The lost outpost says:
November 6, 2008 at 2:30 pm
[…] in applying technology in a smarter way. I’m excited that this has widened out to a group of folks who are supporting Chris Dalby’s Home Camp idea in London later this […]
jgovernor says:
November 6, 2008 at 11:09 pm
hello Phoebe how are you? there are quite a few write ups of current cost being used out there. the Guardian has a great podcast by jemima kiss with andy stanford clark.
Barcamp Hamburg 2: How to Foster Collective Action Against Global Warming | Sören's Blog says:
November 26, 2008 at 1:23 pm
[…] A nice little tool to visualize the energy consumtion of your building: http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/10/31/home-automation-camp-november-29th-08/ and http://currentcost.co.uk/ […]
Sam Clark says:
November 27, 2008 at 6:18 am
Thanks for the review of their service, i hv used them in past & they’r good
Homecamp08 « Andrew Whitehouse’s Weblog says:
December 2, 2008 at 1:23 am
[…] Homecamp08 took place on Saturday 29th November at Imperial College, and was organised by Chris Dalby, with help from Andy Stanford-Clark, Dale Lane, and James Governor. […]
Homecamp anyone? | Web of Things says:
April 23, 2009 at 9:22 am
[…] there. I can’t wait to be there, and meet all these cool people! Given what I read about the first one, it’s gonna be awesome! Share this […]