will "allow [users] to see, understand, monitor and control their domestic consumption." They have a short video (in Swedish, but easily understood) showing an energy monitor as a sort of EKG on an iPhone. These guys are hip, and they have been into this stuff for a while. I'm not sure how well it motivates users, but it looks good. They have a bunch of cool designs as part of their Static! project, and some of the designs--like the power-aware cord--look like they might actually go into production. Other work in a similar vein is happening through their Aware project, such as a light switch that looks more aesthetically pleasing in the "off" position.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
VisualWattch from the Interactive Institute
The Interactive Institute in Sweden is developing (as a concept or in practice is not clear to me) interfaces that promote energy-as-a-service. The brief description claims that the Wattch project
Blueroof Research Cottage
Last Tuesday we (Ethan, Lucio and myself) visited the Blueroof Technologies model research cottage.
Our goal was to find out what the new house they're building is going to look like, specially in terms of the electric layout. We intend to deploy a general purpose data acquisition device to constantly monitor the current and voltage at the main feed of the house, and from there disaggregate the energy consumption of individual electrical appliances.
The fact that these houses have a massive deployment of sensors is attractive to us, because this will serve as a ground truth against which we can compare the effectiveness of our disaggregating algorithms. The scenario is similar to that of a blind man learning to see the world through his hands. Each time he makes a prediction of what the object he is holding is, he can rely on other people's judgment to improve his learning process.
Our goal was to find out what the new house they're building is going to look like, specially in terms of the electric layout. We intend to deploy a general purpose data acquisition device to constantly monitor the current and voltage at the main feed of the house, and from there disaggregate the energy consumption of individual electrical appliances.
The fact that these houses have a massive deployment of sensors is attractive to us, because this will serve as a ground truth against which we can compare the effectiveness of our disaggregating algorithms. The scenario is similar to that of a blind man learning to see the world through his hands. Each time he makes a prediction of what the object he is holding is, he can rely on other people's judgment to improve his learning process.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
IBACOS meeting
Mario and I met with Eric Helton from IBACOS to discuss possible collaboration. They are building a "lab house" in Pittsburgh (breaking ground around the end of the year) in which we might be able to install some electricity monitoring equipment. They are also building a lighting testbed in their lab which will have a number of different lighting fixtures, and we might be able to gather signatures from those fixtures.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
CommonSense ToolKit
CSTK: open source tools for sensor communication, sensor data processing and visualization. Doesn't seem to have been updated much since 2004-2006, but Dr. Kristof Van Laerhoven appears to be the current manager of the code. Several papers describe its design intention, features, and examples. I've downloaded it and will see if I can get it running. One criticism of this toolbox is that it is missing support for sending commands to a node and receiving more complex data types from a sensor. Perhaps these can be added to the code base?
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