Interface for a new Electricity Panel

Continuing my research to build a real-time powermeter, from the idea, to the hardware part, let’s move and look what could be done on the interface site.

Some people have already begun to build these interface, some others have dreamt about it, here is a small survey about some of them:

Telefonica in Madrid

Telefonica has got a kind of Apple Store on Madrid biggest avenue (Gran Via).
Apart from the whitish look, and the static electricity problem, it’s got a domotic showroom with various technologies, from the tactil mirror that speak to you about the weather forecast, to the eye-toy TV to play with.

A small corner is dedicated to this energy screen, you can set the light, open/close a windows blind, and follow the electricity cunsomption on this screen.

The graph, that shows the KwH consumme each second, is not really clear at first look What it shows is 2 lines: bottom one is your consumption with “Hogar Solucion” merchandsing, showing you the difference with the top one that puts you in the red zone of “you consumme too much!”.

The rest of the interface is pretty clean, with big number you just need to follow by curiosity. The bad part is you need to read a manual to understand any of these numbers.

CurrentCost CC128

That’s the interface a harware piece you plug on your circuit to follow your consumption.

Same here, it requires a manual, ad it’s pretty messy. The designer probably got a clue by copying these popular weather stations.

But there’s something realy innovative in this design compare to the others: it’s really cost effective, you don’t need to have your computer or a Plasma screen switch on all the time, so you might feel like you reduce your energy consumption by this mean.

Microsoft Sustainability by Oh, Hello

I really invite you to watch the whole video, there’re a lot of ideas and details on this futuristic interface research.

This panel is interesting too, really clean, big numbers, comprehensive colors, and a lot of informations in one read.

I’ll need your help to understand the color gradients in the graph, and the model might not be appliable to my research: this example show a hybrid use of electricity, like in hybrid cars, switching from the solar panels to the national electricity grid.

The house map is quite interesting to have an idea of which part of the house is consumming.

HomeLinux interface

The hacker view of energy consumption, sometimes that’s all you need, and it can be done really quickly.

Tweet-a-Watt

An experiement from Adafruit that connect LCD appliance, that count watts on a plug, to twitter, throwing a hook for anybody wh’s got some idea about how to expand it with a social mean.

On a sidenote, that’s probably the hardware solution I’ll use to have a remote access to the electricity counter in our flat.