Everyone’s Favorite Energy Meter Hack, Now Wireless

January 9, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

[Kalle] is at it again with more hacks on electricity use meters. This time, the meter has been hacked to stream their data over the aether wirelessly. Now, data can be grabbed from multiple devices simultaneously, making the possibilities for home energy monitoring limitless

The first project [Kalle] did involved finding a meter from China with capabilities similar to (and cheaper than) the Kill-a-Watt meters. Unlike the Kill-a-Watt which spits out analog values, the Chinese meter sent digital information out on a ribbon cable with the bus lines labeled. Since the meter was so hackable, [Kalle] took it even further in this hack.

With those pesky wires out of the way, the device now uses an Arduino Pro Mini to sniff the energy meter’s data stream. Then it transmits the data wirelessly with a nRF34L01+ transceiver. As a perk, all of these chips fit inside the case of the energy meter, making this a very tidy hack indeed. The project code an incredible amount of detail is available on the project site, so be sure to check this one out for all of your energy monitoring needs!

C-clamp Current Monitoring

December 21, 2009 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

[Hydronic] did some tests to make his own current sensor using a c-clamp wrapped with wire. He tried several different cores including an aluminum carabiner, the C-clamp, and what he calls a u-lock (removable chain link). There is some success here that could be improved with cleaner winding and by adjusting readings based on the length of wire used in the wrapping.

This did make us perk up a bit right off the bat. Reader [Mure], who tipped us off about this, suggested that this could be used to make your own Kill-a-Watt without including it in the circuit. We made the jump to house monitoring. We’d love to have a data tracker for our home circuits to curb wasteful energy use. Perhaps we’ll try to make our own sensors and produce a diy Cent-a-Meter.

Tweet-a-Watt Wins Greener Gadgets Design Competition

February 27, 2009 by Eliot 28 Comments

tweetawatt

The team behind the the Tweet-a-Watt/Wattcher just won first prize at the Greener Gadgets design competition. The device is a hacked Kill A Watt that transmits power consumption using an XBee. After checking out DVICE’s preview of the competitors yesterday, we’re happy to see a prototype win instead of just a concept sketch.

Wattcher, Twittering Kill A Watt Plans Posted

January 24, 2009 by Eliot 20 Comments

You probably saw [Phillip Torrone] and [Limor Fried]’s twittering Kill A Watt earlier this week. It was an entry in the Core77/Greener Gadgets Design Competition. We saw a little bit about how it was assembled, but now they’ve posted a full guide to assembling the hardware. Each Kill A Watt gets an XBee radio that transmits back to a receiver that logs the power usage. The difficult part when putting this design together was the XBee required 50mA when transmitting. This is well above the Kill A Watt’s internal power supply. They remedied this by adding a 10,000uF supercap to act as a rechargeable battery. The daily twittering is just a side-effect of the project. The Kill A Watts transmit every 2 seconds, so you’ll get a very accurate report of your power usage. This is a great project for renters who can’t permanently modify their power infrastructure. Each Kill A Watt can support quite a few appliances since they’re rated for 15A, ~1800W.

25C3: Solar-powering Your Gear

December 27, 2008 by Eliot 10 Comments

solar

The 25th Chaos Communication Congress is underway in Berlin. One of the first talks we dropped in on was [script]’s Solar-powering your Geek Gear. While there are quite a few portable solar products on the market, we haven’t seen much in the way of real world experience until now.

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Kill A Watt Teardown

November 10, 2008 by Eliot 16 Comments

killawatt

Come on, folks. If we keep tearing apart everything that’s handed to us, we’ll never get nice things. SparkFun got their mitts on two Kill A Watts and proceeded to plug them into everything and then dismantled them to see how they work. The Kill A Watt keeps track of how much power is used over time. The largest load they found was their soda machine using 500W (should probably add a motion sensor to that). They plugged a meter on either side of a UPS and found out that it uses 5W just to charge. On the inside of the meter, there isn’t anything too substantial. One unlabeled IC runs the whole show.