EnerMeter

Today Scott Hanselman posted about Adding Custom Search Providers, and it reminded me that FeaturePics has had this capability for a long time. But how many people know how to use it? Possibly everyone but me? I never noticed how it works with modern browsers until today after reading Scott's piece. I wrote the FeaturePics opensearch provider about a year ago for use with Amazon's A9, and then thought no more about it. It seems to work just fine in this context also.

Point your browser at http://www.featurePics.com.

Notice the orange drop down button to the right of the Google search box. Go ahead and click the drop down.

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Wolfram Alpha is finally available.

From the LA Times:

How long does it take to get to Saturn at, say, the speed of light?
With Wolfram Alpha, the online "computational knowledge engine" that launched Monday, the answer -- 75 minutes -- can be found in a fraction of a second.

Image is the XP Html Application version.

Go to widget / gadget download below.

We are involved with monitoring solar panel power generation systems in California and Galapagos. We have a web site where the monitoring results can be seen. The URL is http://rMeter.com. On the web site we show lots of details, often including the power consumption of the building on which the panels are located. People like having this information available, but a small effort is required to see the system performance on the web site.

We have also prepared widgets for Vista, Mac, and XP that show at a glance what a particular solar system is doing during the course of the day. They start the display at 6:00 AM, and continue through 8:00 PM.

The Mac and Vista widgets have a configuration feature where you can enter the URL for the specific system to be displayed into the widget. Note that these are not web page URLs and putting one into your browser will not produce anything useful (or even interesting).

 The list of presently available URLs follows:

Here is the widget for Vista

To install the Vista Widget just extract the zip file, there is a file inside called "rMeter Solar.gadget". Run it.

Vista will show the install message for the widget, click install.

To change the station you have to go to settings. (When the mouse is over the widget the icon for settings will appear.It’s the one to the right, the one that looks like a tool).

In the url box change for the url to the station you want from the list above. The widget may be installed as many times as you like, each Sidebar Gadget can have  a different url.

Here is the widget for Mac

To Open the setting page of the Mac widget, put your mouse over the widget. In your bottom right corner you will find a  small "i".  This is the common link to options in the Mac widget. Open the settings page and paste your URL in the "URL Feed" Box and Click Ok.

Widgets for XP

Widgets for XP and earlier work a little differently because XP does not have any built-in facility for running widgets. To accomplish essentially the same thing, we have created a series of "Html Applications", or .hta files, for each installation. Each of these Html Applications consists of a folder containing several files. One of these files is named "rMeterSolar.hta". Double click it.

Each of the Html Applications must be downloaded separately as follows.

Central Coating Company

West Marine Store

Live Oak Industrial Park

ElectroRoof Test

Plantronics World Headquarters

Pedro Pablo Andrade Elementary

EOLICSA Control Building

West Cliff Apartments

GSA Salinas

We have done some other widgets as well. This link will take you to a series of them we did for FeaturePics Images.

  Potsdam Institute For Climate Impact Research discussing an article in Nature, International weekly journal of science.

On the way to phasing out emissions: More than 50% reductions needed by 2050 to respect 2°C climate target

 

Illustrative Figure for free use:

   Two possible futures: One in which no climate policies are implemented (red), and one with strong action to mitigate emissions (blue). Shown are fossil CO₂ emissions (top panel) and corresponding global warming (bottom panel). The shown mitigation pathway limits fossil and land-use related CO₂ emissions to 1000 billion tonnes CO₂ over the first half of the 21st century with near-zero net emissions thereafter. Greenhouse gas emissions of this pathway in year 2050 are ~70% below 1990 levels. Without climate policies, global warming will cross 2°C by the middle of the century. Strong mitigation actions according to the blue route would limit the risk of exceeding 2°C to 25%.

...

April 30, 2009 - Less than a quarter of the proven fossil fuel reserves can be burnt and emitted between now and 2050, if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius (2°C), says a new study published in the journal Nature today (1).

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Unity has announced that their Unity 2.5 IDE is now cross platform and now works Windows in addition to MacOS.

Unity rebuilt the entire Cocoa-based UI that they had previously with a Unity-powered UI. The entire UI is now built in C# using the Unity built-in APIs (all the controls, views, widgets).

This is a little bit like a compiler compiling itself. This time it is an IDE built using the IDE itself

Hot Off the Presses: Unity Goes to Windows

There was a Greener Gadgets Contest and the Tweet-a-Watt won. The first place I saw it was on blog.makzine.com.

Eventually a pretty detailed tutorial and parts list appeared at ladyAda.net.

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Zigbee networking came up as a fairly serious discussion topic and I spent some time with Google. Here is where I document what I learned so I can find it again.

Zigbee is a mesh network standard that operates over IEEE 802.15.4 networking hardware. The software protocol is called Zigbee and it is administered by the Zigbee Alliance (link is to the products page). There are plenty of announced gateways and products out there. I wonder how many are real?

There is a reasonable explanation of the 802.15.4  spec here. At least it looks reasonable to a Zigbee novice like me.

Product Design and Development has a sort of round table on 802.15.4. A comment by Robin Heydon caught my eye:

The technology best suited for consumer products is either Bluetooth low energy, or a combination of Bluetooth with a higher speed radio for transferring large files. Unlike 802.15.4, Bluetooth only needs to be on when it is sending or receiving. During down time the radio is switched off to save power. Bluetooth low energy is designed for products such as watches, sports devices and products that do not need to send large amount of data.

Zigbee comes in various forms including chipset radios that cost about $5 each, near as I can tell. Texas Instruments makes some of these products. Others do as well. Here is a chipset level comparison chart. Zigbee/802.15.4 Chip Comparison Guide.

Trilliant appears to be focused on selling to utilities: Trilliant passes 1 million.

Tendril is the company that got us started thinking about Zigbee.

Tendril explained by Tendril. 

Zigbee is an "open standard", but it costs $3500 per year to get the specs. However, there is an in progress truly open source effort that you can read about at freaklabs open source zigbee blog. I think this may be the mother lode for learning about Zigbee. See the Featured Zigbee Articles.

Engaget has a Zigbee tag. Some of these look pretty interesting:

Nokia launching Z-Wave Home Control Center next year

Philips SJM3151 universal remote mirrors your iPod screen

"Tweet-a-watt - our entry for the Core77 & Greener Gadgets design competition" is a Kill-a-Watt(TM) power meter modified to "tweet" (publish wirelessly) the daily KWH consumed to the user's Twitter account (Cumulative Killowatt-hours).

And here are the instructions. There are several links inside. Pretty much anything you need to know is there.

We had a conversation with  Hayden Williamson of Digi International, mostly about their X2 ($200), X4 ($400 or $500 depending on options), and X10(?) gateway devices. These are programmable in Python and have about 1 mB of unused memory. It has an Arm processor.

An alternative to Zigbee is GainSpan's lower power WiFi: http://www.gainspan.com/ GainSpan is claim 3 years on one AA battery (versus Tendril's 2 AA).

Another alternative is X10:

And here is a fancy home power meter based on X10 and an IOBridge IO-204 Monitor & Control Module.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Real_time_Web_Based_Household_Power_Usage_Monitor/

I just found a XBee Wiki 

Monterey Bay Shores Website

Off highway one north of Monterey.

Imagine how hard it would be to stick to a budget in a store with no prices. Well, that's pretty much how we buy electricity today. Your utility company sends you a bill at the end of the month with very few details. Most people don't know how much electricity their appliances use, where in the house they are wasting electricity, or how much the bill might go up during different seasons. But in a world where everyone had a detailed understanding of their home energy use, we could find all sorts of ways to save energy and lower electricity bills. In fact, studies show that access to home energy information results in savings between 5-15% on monthly electricity bills. It may not sound like much, but if half of America's households cut their energy demand by 10 percent, it would be the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.

And now for the new part

But deploying smart meters alone isn't enough. This needs to be coupled with a strategy to provide customers with easy access to energy information. That's why we believe that open protocols and standards should serve as the cornerstone of smart grid projects, to spur innovation, drive competition, and bring more information to consumers as the smart grid evolves. We believe that detailed data on your personal energy use belongs to you, and should be available in an open standard, non-proprietary format. You should control who gets to see your data, and you should be free to choose from a wide range of services to help you understand it and benefit from it. For more details on our policy suggestions, check out the comments we filed yesterday with the California Public Utility Commission.

In addition to policy advocacy, we're building consumer tools, too. Over the last several months, our engineers have developed a software tool called Google PowerMeter, which will show consumers their home energy information almost in real time, right on their computer. Google PowerMeter is not yet available to the public since we're testing it out with Googlers first. But we're building partnerships with utilities and independent device manufacturers to gradually roll this out in pilot programs. Once we've had a chance to kick the tires, we'll make the tool more widely available.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to providing consumers with detailed energy information. And it will take the combined efforts of federal and state governments, utilities, device manufacturers, and software engineers to empower consumers to use electricity more wisely by giving them access to energy information.

The bold is mine. There will be a place for rMeter in this environment.

One of my colleagues, Orly, has completed the widgets that I recently discussed here: Daily Photo Fix Right On Your Desktop. You can see them in action at the FeaturePics web site.

There are links to download all four versions, Vista, Mac, XP, and Windows Hta, together with instructions for how to customize the RSS feed that will show up on your desktop.

Check it out, download the gadget of your choice, and brighten up your desktop -- for free.