The wattvision (~$250) most closely resembles the TED in terms of price and features. The wattvision uses an optical sensor that counts the rotation of the disk in the utility meter. This sensor is connected to the device, which is powered by an AC adapter and sends the data to wattvision’s servers via your home wifi network. This is the easiest to install, but would require running the sensor cable from the outside to inside. Additionally, all data is sent to wattvision’s servers. I’d also need to subscribe to wattvision’s $8.99/month service for the other features I want (like API access.)

The eMonitor (starting around $688 for 12 circuits) is something I just recently discovered. Really, this is my ideal solution: for $1,277, you get the necessary equipment for monitoring the power feed plus 44 individual breakers. This gives a much better view of where your power consumption is going. Per-circuit monitoring also enables nifty alerts — an SMS for power draw in the kids room after school starts on a week day, or if the compressor on the fridge is running longer than normal (time to clean the coils, etc.) I just can’t justify the expense at $1,277. The price is certainly reasonable for what you are getting, but there is no way the wife would approve the purchase :/

The Energy Detective (TED, ~$200) from Energy Inc provides full house consumption monitoring like the wattvision. Unlike the wattvision, the data is stored and served from a gateway device on your home network. Two current transformers go around the two lines for the incoming split phase feed. These are connected to a box, which is installed next-to-or-inside the breaker panel. The breaker panel is powered and communicates via a connection to a breaker on each phase. The gateway is installed elsewhere in the house and plugs into an outlet for power and communication with the current sensor, and via Ethernet to serve its precious data up.

So, February 10th I finally got approval from the wife to order the TED and purchased the TED 5000-G with overnight shipping. It arrived as expected on the 11th and I was eager to install it. A coworker (also interested in the TED,) came over for dinner and to help out with the installation. I was too excited to wait for his arrival and finished the install before he got there ;-).

It’s now February 27th and I still don’t have a working TED system. The gateway I was originally shipped has a defective Ethernet port. It’s already been to Energy Inc and back and is still defective. They finally agreed to ship me a replacement gateway on the 25th but sent it with 2nd day shipping, which has the same transit time as ground (just more expensive.) The new unit should arrive March 1st.

Optional TED Display

I have another blog post in the works documenting my seemingly unending issues with the other half of the TED solution: the support staff and engineers backing the product. To be fair, the support staff is 1:2 — the second guy I spoke to there was great, but I’m pretty sure their engineers shouldn’t be allowed to know customers even exist, let alone talk to them on the phone. But, this is a story for my next blog post.

Sorry check back later for pics, Steve Jobs says I don’t need copy & paste as I’m sending this from the wordpress app on my iPhone.

Update:

One note of clearification, as crazy as the feature set on these machines is, I still wouldn’t mind having one to use whenever I wanted, imagine what you could do with it! The commercial I saw is available in flash form at
http://www.sharpusa.com/files/workwithoutlimits.swf.

My one liner that runs from cron (split to multiple lines for readability):

More details on the full implementation in the original post over at Caspar Clemens Mierau’s blog. And yes, I stole his loadavg stuff too ;)

UPDATE:

Silly me, upon further investigation, two things to note. First, the -i option applies only to current conditions and not to the forecast. In my case I actually want weather -f ACY and /etc/weatherrc takes care of the rest. Secondly, the field number for the precipitation percentage changes, oops. I’ve correctly accounted for this in the updated awk script above.

After making these changes I decided the awk script was getting a bit long for a single line so I went all out creating ~/bin/weather.awk:

My crontab entry now looks like:

Much simpler.

.

is a dead simple command, everything you need to know about it you can get from the usage information:

[michael@orion(~)] timeout
usage: timeout [-signal] time command…

And an example:

[michael@orion(~)] timeout 5 cat
Timeout: aborting command “cat” with signal 9
Killed
[michael@orion(~)]

How did I not know about this before?!?

Failing available open source software, what about commercial software? I’m aware of software from upek that supports their Eikom as well as ancient software from Sony for their Puppy scanner. I’m looking for something that would support multiple scanners, ideally the U.are.U stuff. Though if anybody wanted to trade a pair of USB U.are.U scanners for an Eikom one, that would be great too ;)

[18:54:56] < bhale> mikegrb: they should arrest the googlebot

Adding a DS to a bunch of RRD files is a big pain, RRD doesn’t have any sort of native mechanism for doing this. The usual procedure is exporting the RRD data to XML, creating a new rrd file with the old datastores plus your new ones, then importing the data back in from the XML.

A while back I needed to do this for a load of RRDs so I wrote a quick and dirty bash script for it. Today I had reason to add a DS again but couldn’t find my script. A bit of googling was no help either, surely other people have this problem too? I discovered Nicola Worthington’s RRD::Simple contains add_source method so a few moments in TextMate later we have:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use RRD::Simple();

my $rrd_path = "/path/to/dir/of/rrds/";
my @rrd_files = <$rrd_path/*.rrd>;

my $rrd = RRD::Simple->new();

for my $file (@rrd_files) {
    print "Processing $file...";
    $rrd->add_source($file, 'DS_name' => 'DERIVE');
    print " ok.\n";
}

That is all.

This is the call:

“So what seems to be the problem?”
“Well I have a Mac and the box said the Mac is supported so I installed the drivers and software that came with it and the software that came with it says there is no video from the cam”
“Oh, well since you said you have a Mac you will need to contact the manufacturer of the computer
to see if…”
“There is nothing wrong with the computer.”
“Right but maybe there is some sort of driver that you need for the Mac to make it work.”
“Exactly, and that driver comes from the manufacturer of the device, that would be Dynex, whom you
represent.”
Click.

Just to be clear, that click there at the end is them hanging up on me. I guess they couldn’t argue with that.