This project involved hacking a common Kill-a-Watt power meter to transmit data wirelessly usign an Xbee to my computer (Mac), and then upload the data to two different websites (Pachube.com & Google App Engine) to display graphically…
A much simpler and more useful alternative to plotting with Google is to use Pachube. Pachube allows you to upload your live data and share it with others. Likewise, you can use other people’s data feeds to control something locally or use many feeds to make composite plots, etc. The data is submitted using a fairly simple protocol called Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML) which you can learn about at Pachube.
To upload my data, I used one of the basic python scripts available on ladyada’s site and modified it to send the data tagged in EEML using this python library python-eeml from petervizi. Here is my resulting Pachube data feed and a Flash plot…
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Thanks to Brian for this. Note that Brian’s script makes this a “Pach-a-Watt” since there is no longer any Tweeting involved. I have returned the Twitter code to the script if you want to send to Pachube and also tweet the results – A PachTweet-a-Watt!
Note also that, as Brian first pointed out to me, both of these Pachube variants may quit after a few hours if the update to Pachube fails. If someone would like to add to this a graceful way to keep running, please do.
Thanks to Brian for this. Note that Brian’s script makes this a “Pach-a-Watt” since there is no longer any Tweeting involved. I have returned the Twitter code to the script if you want to send to Pachube and also tweet the results – A PachTweet-a-Watt!
You can find that script at http://is.gd/rX8x
Note also that, as Brian first pointed out to me, both of these Pachube variants may quit after a few hours if the update to Pachube fails. If someone would like to add to this a graceful way to keep running, please do.
Cheers – Dave Pentecost @dpentecost