Doing an instrumentation experiment with our water consumption. Over the years I have put in a number of underground pipes, and I do the winter shutdown later and later every year. There is no meter on my well so I can’t really tell if the well pump is on or off for long periods of time. I also have no idea how much water we use. I am considering a computer controlled shutoff valve, or maybe a remote controlled power switch for the well pump to turn it off when there is abnormal usage. I picked up a Clark Model CLXC-20D-C-S and I am going to connect it today. I have not looked into the details of the output signal and how to interface it to some type of computer, something small like a Basic Stamp or maybe just get a board or USB device for one of the servers. If I were to buy a new house I would actually ask if you can get one with a built in web server with local instrumentation.
In 1998/9, several of us in Sun Labs and with help from Dallas Semiconductor, developed a bunch of technology for monitoring and securely controlling appliances for home automation applications. Time marches on but I can;t get over how many things in this article are ideas that Sun’s forward thinking CEO Scott McNealy presented to audiences all over the world many times a long time ago. I can’t find it but there were some press rants similar to Cramer’s rants about how stupid the ideas were. It looks like others are coming up with applications. We developed and built working prototypes of the following. If I were starting again, I would probably start with the Sun SPOT technology from Sun Labs.
- Double door refrigerator interfaced to the Internet
- Advanced Oven(Microwave, Infrared and Convection)
- A general purpose X10 device for interfacing to various manufacturer protocols using a PIC. ( will look for a picture of one)
- A light switch that was addressable using a tini board. (Dallas Semiconductor TINI they did all the heavy lifting, we played a minor role, tech note)
- We had prototypes for putting Java Card technology on each device to implement secure challenge response and point to point encryption with secret keys
- Dallas provided weather stations and low cost sensors that we wanted to use for telemetry. (Cheap wireless was not available, it still isn’t looking for 2-3 dollars for wireless)
When the Internet bust happened we got lumped into “questionable” research efforts and they were probably right. We could not show the cost benefit and the utility. There really are tremendous safety issues. Be careful trusting someone with this kind of technology, they could burn your house down in one scenario. A few years later I looked into it some more from the aspect of monitoring energy usage. I blogged about it a lot later than when I had first worked on it. I was just rereading the code from 2000 and I see it is very similar to the JSON idea. We were not smart enough to come up with JSON but we wanted machines to talk to web servers and get pages, in 1998/1999. So we had the server return java property type files in both this project and an earlier one called Java Wallet. Necessity is the mother of invention. I discussed some of this in Simultaneity of Invention.
A friend told me about PowerMeter from Google. I hope that it takes off and eventually grows into a home you can control from the Internet. It does start to feel like “Matrix” and or “SkyNet” when “it” can get to a light switch in your home. I wish we had started the project ten years later.
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