A Rice Cooker wants to be my Friend on Twitter. Miranda writes –
Hello, I’ve just published a conference paper, “A Rice Cooker wants to be my Friend on Twitter” (in the ETHICOMP 2011 proceedings), which gives a reference to Tweet-a-Watt. I thought you might like to know.
Pervasive computing devices are already using Twitter as a communication channel. In the future you may receive unwanted friend requests from inanimate objects. Even if you refuse them all, receiving frequent friend requests can be annoying, and may lead you to mistakenly refuse some welcome friend requests. There are some Twitter validation services which assist and partially automate the decision of which requests to accept; but these have limitations. Without improved validation services, the rise of pervasive computing devices on Twitter or similar networks may degrade the experience of the human users of these networks.
Tweet-a-Watt is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data. This pack contains nearly everything* necessary to build a single outlet monitor and receiver. To monitor additional outlets, you will need an add-on transmitter pack. One outlet can monitor up to 1500 Watts.
The starter pack contains:
- 2 XBee modules (one for receiver, one for transmitter)
- 2 XBee adapter kits (ditto)
- 1 USB FTDI cable (for updating, configuring and receiving data from XBee)
- 1 bag of parts including 10,000uF capacitor, 220uF capacitor, 2 1% 10K resistors, 2 1% 4.7K resistors, 5mm green LED, 6″ rainbow ribbon cable, and 2 pieces of 1/8″ and 1/16″ heatshrink