Kiran’s latest thinking on how to enact change is The Design for Giving Contest. Through this, an entire emerging generation is called to action. She’s continued to drive home the point “Do not let the teachers drive the project; let them just guide it.”

Stanford d school and IDEO team with the contest team while designing the toolkits.

With over 1300 entries pouring in from children full of earnest thinking and concern the teams from Continuum, IDEO, and the Institute of Design at Stanford were sure to be overwhelmed. As any contest of this size our team was rigorously making sure every entry had fulfilled each category with a level of clarity and conviction. Though, we also admitted how each entry would be its own mystery whose impacts we couldn’t possibly fully grasp: the elderly they visited, the thirsty villagers they spoke with, or the water sanitation issues they researched. Qualifying the entries would be soft, but also hard and fast. Sixth senses were hard to trust on this one.

I will not forget one particular entry. As we were going through many dozens of entries we began to learn their rhythm, their formats, language and tactics. Shivesh Pandey’s entry was different. This 11 year-old dove into a problem we hadn’t seen in other entries. He started to envision a technology device for his local train station. He explained that his motivation was several deaths from people trying to cross the train tracks as unannounced trains wizzed through the terminal. Following his explanation he submitted his genius: a fully equipped, stacked device outlining each feature – in crayon and colored pencil. Without a flinch, he had the answer. He was simply calling for its production and installation.

Electro Radio Transfer Waves - Shivesh Pandey

We’ll look forward to staying involved in Kiran’s work as it surely evolves. Kiran recently shook things up at TEDIndia and her contagious thinking. It seems the contest already has a life of its own – in the best way.

There is still quite a bit of detective work to be done. A cursory look at our graphs shows we are using on average 40kWatts (the equivalent of 400, 100 Watt, light bulbs) during nights/weekends and about 120kWatts peak during normal business hours.

From the below graph we can see that during business hours something is causing large spikes. Since this only happens during typical work hours we could probably attribute this behavior to the power hungry tools in our awesome Models Shop, or maybe the elevator. The spikes are probably due to the inductive load introduced when a motor such as a saw or compressor is turned on.

The chart below is a display of power use over a ten day period. You can see the reduced power consumption over the weekends and holidays. I would gather that since there is a small amount of power consumption on Monday May 25th (Memorial Day) some Continuumites are workaholics!

What’s Next

Possible improvements
Migrate data server applications to a proper web server
Add multi client capabilities so we can host data from other users.
Tie in real time power cost metrics
Carbon footprint tie in
Tie in weather parameters such as outside temperature and humidity.

Contribute
If you find this design intriguing and would like to contribute in some way, or if you have any questions feel free to email me at mcosta@dcontinuum.com

The client application runs on the iMx21 meter reader. It contains 2 endless threads SocketThread and LCD Thread.

LCDThread – each iteration of the loop it performs a frame grab using the EZFB API. It converts the image to grayscale then calculates the average pixel intensity for the square we care about. The pixel intensity is low when the box on the Elster LCD is “on” and goes up when the box is cleared. This thread also draws a square onto the LCD screen so the person installing the meter reader can easily align the video camera.

Images of the meter reader output LCD.
The Kh box is visible, note the O/F text output. 1 means the box has been detected.

The Hr box is not visible, note the O/F text output. 0 means the box has not been detected.

The second thread is the SocketThread. This thread waits for a new measurement from the LCDThread. When a new value is ready it just sends the power value over Socket to the web server.

Testing
I tested the accuracy of the box blink rate algorithm with a test LCD display. Using a Microchip Explorer16 Dev board and a PIC24H processor, I rigged up a simple blinking box on the explorer16 LCD. With this test setup I set the blink rate to .1Hz, 1Hz, and 10Hz to verify my Emeter application.

Calculations
This application converts Blink Time to power in kilo-watts. The formula for this calculation is:

Power (kW) = (.9kWh * 3600s * 200) / BlinkTime
The .9kW and 200 are values taken from the meter.

Data & Web Server
The web server is running Ubuntu Hardy Heron, ProFTPD and Apache 2.0

EMeterServer Application
The EMeterServer has only one simple socket thread. This thread just sits and waits for a new Power value from the client. If there is a new value, it writes it to a MySQL database table.

Web Server
The data server hosts the data via simple RSS feed, and Perl scripts. Any internet ready device or web page could access the scripts or RSS feeds to get real time power use.

PowerRss.php – Returns an XML RSS feed that contains the latest power use value.

graphUpdateLong.pl- Returns a link to an image of a graph of the power use over time.

meterUpdate.pl – Returns a link to an image indicating the power use as a simple needle meter.

GoogleJSON2.pl -Returns a JSON object table containing historical power use. (used for Google Visualizations API)

Insert a link to these files in your web browser and you will see the results

http://209.48.56.105/power/PowerRss.php

http://209.48.56.105/power/graphUpdateLong.pl

http://209.48.56.105/power/meterUpdate.pl

http://209.48.56.105/power/GoogleJSON2.pl

Design Overview

The electricity monitoring system consists of two major components. The first component is the utility meter reading device, the second is the data server. The utility meter reader monitors electricity usage and sends the latest value to the data server via TCP/IP sockets. The data server stores this value and serves the historical data through custom Perl scripts for web page display or RSS feed.

Utility meter reading in the electrical closet.

Overview

The Elster A3 Alpha utility meter has a blinking box (called Kh in the manual) on the LCD display with a blink frequency proportional to the instantaneous power use (marked by A in the above image). Every time the box changes state, this indicates .9kWh have been used. This will be our method of monitoring instantaneous power use. 

 In short this is an Embedded Linux device centered upon a Freescale iMx21 processor. It optically reads power usage from the utility meter and feeds the latest power consumption data to the server through a custom TCP/IP socket.

 The main requirement for the meter reader was flexibility. Some other requirements are video input/output and Ethernet. As a result I decided to use an ARM based processor that could run embedded Linux. This would allow me to develop software in a flexible Linux setting using GNU libraries and I would have a greater array of compatible hardware peripherals should I need them. 

Freescale iMX

We have worked with Freescale iMX processors on a few previous projects before so I knew they would be sufficient for my needs.  The iMX21 micro has an Enhanced Multi-Media Acceleration (EMMA) peripheral built in which frees the ARM processor from some of the intensive video manipulation tasks. The M9328MX21ADS development board from Freescale comes with an Embedded Linux BSP making it a very attractive platform for its “out of the box” quality.  Plus Gerry Vahe the FAE at Freescale is an Embedded Linux buff and he is a great resource because if you have ever built an embedded Linux development environment you know it can be a headache at times!

Freescale M9328MX21ADS development board, some notable features: 

·     IMX21 Arm Processor

·      Video Camera

·     3.5″ TGT QVGA LCD module 

·        Ethernet Interface, RS232

·     Hardware based RS232 bootloader ensuring I can never “brick” my device. 

Freescale Linux BSP with LTIB

·     Powerful kernel containing drivers for hardware included with the ADS dev. board

·      Blob TCP/IP bootloader featuring NFS capabilities & RS232 shell terminal

·      Includes GNU arm compilers and libraries

·      Includes a large array of demonstration applications and utilities.

I especially like the flexibility of deleloping an embedded device using NFS (Network File System). With NFS I don’t need to flash the device with new firmware for each build, I just recompile and reboot the device. The bootloader is setup with the proper IPs to fetch the kernel and file system image from my Linux development machine.

Tune in next week for a description of the software.  

Option 1

There are many options to monitoring power use.  One such way is to attach inductive coils around the main power lines to monitor Voltage and Current.  There are lots of products on the market that can be used in a residential setting.  These products require direct access to the mains power lines, but our commercial electrical closet has a main circuit breaker indicating 4000 Amps.  There is no way we were going anywhere near that!  Since we did not want to professionally install any expensive equipment for this initial experimentation stage we opted not to go this route.

from Elster Alpha Plus manual

Option 2

The Elster utility meter has an ANSI C12 Infrared data port on the front (marked by B in the above image) offering the ability to read power measurements from the meter.  The hardware protocol is a simple RS232 like-Infrared serial protocol.  We initially considered using this data port to read data from the meter but upon talking to NStar about it they told us we were not permitted to attach anything to the meter itself as this would be a violation of the meter lease agreement.

Option 3

The Elster meter has a numerical LCD display of the total watt/hours accumulated by the meter over a finite period of time.  We considered implementing an Optical Character Recognition system that would read the values on the LCD with a webcam and convert that to power use.  Unfortunately the values seemed to only update on a daily basis.  We wanted at least up to the minute resolution so this method was out of the question.

Option 4

After some research on the Elster A3 Alpha utility meter I found that there is a blinking box on the LCD display that has a frequency proportional to the instantaneous power use (marked by A in the above image).  Every time the box changes state, this indicates .9kWh (kilo Watt hours) have been used.  Finally a feature we can work with!  We will watch the blinking box with a web cam on an embedded Linux device and determine the energy use by monitoring the blink rate.

Tune in next week where I discuss the electronics and software design.

Blog 1 of a 5 part series

A few months ago I posted a blog about real time electricity monitoring and how studies show this generally reduces power consumption.  At that time I had just started a side project to monitor our electricity usage here at Continuum West Newton.  This is a multi part story of my travels.

Intent

To develop a highly flexible system for real time acquisition, storage, and display of electricity usage statistics.

To share this technology with the world facilitating energy use awareness as well as collaboration.

To further promote the concept of a “Smart Grid,” and demonstrate its economic and environmental benefits.

Why Flexibility

The Smart Grid is still under development so we feel that upgradability and modularity are extremely important for such a volatile and fast paced field of innovation.

Leveraging ubiquitous wired/wireless communication infrastructure and protocols such as TCP/IP, 802.11 and Ethernet removes the need for unmanageable proprietary hardware resulting in long term upgradability and modularity.  

Why Real Time

Real time power monitoring has been proven to effectively reduce power consumption due to waste.  It is intuitive to consider that humans need some sort of feedback in order to recognize the presence of waste.  For example if one leaves the faucet open one has sound and sight feedback indicating there is waste.  What sort of feedback do we have for electricity?  None really, this is why these systems can help with waste reduction.

Personal or home use real time power monitoring has proven to be effective but this project is an experiment on efficacy within a commercial setting such as an office building.  It is difficult to quantify ones contribution to power consumption in an office setting.  As a result our analysis will focus on large scale behavior.  One such experiment I am curious to try is to have the entire company turn off their computer monitors for 5-10 minutes and see the change in the real time graph.

Why Transparency

As a dedicated member of the Designers Accord, this is yet another step Continuum has taken towards following our carbon footprint, monitoring our progress and sharing our results with the world.

Why Collaboration

Because the design is “open source” we hope that other energy conscious individuals/ organizations will be inspired to collaborate and contribute, resulting in an ever improving system.  For example due to the flexibility of the system architecture we can easily port our data to be fed into the Google PowerMeter. (That is when Google finally gets their act together and puts this thing online!)

http://www.google.org/powermeter/index.html

Tune in next week where I will discuss how I decided to monitor our electricity use.

There has been enough buzz around the PVC problem in the last 10 years that many credit card holders are aware of it, and would prefer a cleaner alternative.

It’s hard to know how many credit cards are really out there, but if every household in the US (~100 million) has 10-20 cards that’s 1-2 billion cards just in the US (yeah, that’s a lot of cards), using 10 million pounds of PVC (about 0.01 lbs/card).

Enter PLA–Polylactide or polylactic acid resin. This stuff has been around a while, and sounds great…made from corn, it’s biodegradable, compostable and renewable so it should be pretty eco-friendly right?

Unfortunately, not really.

There is a down side, at least for the near future. PLA is pretty energy intensive (like corn-based ethanol…don’t get me started), and most of our corn is grown in states whose electricity is coming from coal-fired power plants. Add to that the fact that corn-based products are competing with a food source and it’s reason to pause. Plant-based polymers have to be part of our future, but there’s still work to do.

Another interesting alternative is bio-degradable PVC. While not exactly the plastic of choice for building materials (I’d rather my window frames didn’t disintegrate in 4 years), bio-degradable PVC might work alright in credit cards. Of course, we’d be side-stepping the primary concern of card incineration–biodegradable PVC is just as dioxin prone as non-biodegradable.

So how about just using a more environmentally friendly plastic like PET (water bottles) or HDPE (milk bottles)? Many cards use PET laminates already, and the critical components of the card, like the magnetic stripe, signature panel, graphics, etc. work fine on PET. It ends up one of the big hurdles for PET is the most recognizable and defining element–the embossed account number. PVC is just about perfect for embossing and PET is, well, challenging. Our other alternative HDPE is relatively soft, and just doesn’t make a very appealing card. There is a volume of other plastic resins to choose from, but you quickly start to climb the increasing cost and toxicity slope.

Which leaves us with…PVC. At least for now within the constraints of our investigation. This is not an endorsement of PVC, but rather an acknowledgement of the challenges faced by a deeply embedded industry with a mega-base of installed technology. We’ve got lots of ideas about alternative card formats based on various eco-friendly materials, but not any easy “swap-in” replacements for PVC without tradeoffs.

Material substitution is a logical first step toward sustainability, but our world is filled with highly specialized materials. Some materials have been custom designed to fulfill a specific need, and some industries have been built up over decades based on the specific properties of one material. We can change, but the real solution will require altering industry’s (and our own) status quo.

[Photo: Andres Rueda]

Ever wonder where all that energy you consume to heat up your shower water goes? Well, down the proverbial drain. (Never mind that we are bathing in potable water.) The vast majority of those therms are being flushed! Recovering heat from drain water is not a new idea, and some folks out there are commercializing systems to capture some waste-water energy. Take a look at Ecodrain and GFX Technology, for example. Many other home-grown systems are out there – including Continuum’s. For grins, we built up a shower water heat exchanger that preheats the input cold water using the drain water. It’s our newest resident of our shower lab. The preheated water mixes with the hot at the shower valve, hence lowering the flowrate of the expensive and impactful hot water. Save energy, money, and lower CO2 emmissions. We got pretty wet in the process, too.

Quick and dirty results:
Input Cold: 50F
Shower Drain Water: 65F
Cold After Preheating: 64F

Input Cold: 50F
Shower Drain Water: 72F
Cold After Preheating: 68F

Our shower drain water was tepid, at best, because Wednesday was basketball lunch day and the folks here used the hot water – thankfully.

Next installment of the shower heat exchanger: some analysis and more results. (An LCA that considers copper use will come at some point…)

There are many ways that we show our creativity on a daily basis.  That is, by and large, why the company is so successful today.  We are a team of people who use individual expertise to work together and Innovate.  And that’s a great thing – except in the Software group.

That’s not entirely true.  We need to express creativity in solving problems and meeting requirements; in developing novel algorithms and approaches.  Software engineers need to be creative and think about the problems and solutions in many different ways.

That doesn’t mean creativity in the source code, however.  Our goal is to have the most bland, uniform source code we can.  No novel ways of formatting the C++ should be created; no cleverness in using the language should be innovated.   Our goal is to have my source code indistinguishable from any other member of the group’s.  The only way to know who wrote it should be in the header.  That would be Zen.  (That, and a bucket full of snow and Pabst Blue Ribbon, but I’ll settle for the source code uniformity.)

Computers don’t understand source code.  It’s compiled down to machine language anyway which are all 1′s and 0′s (and to be precise, even these are abstractions!)  Source code is for people to read and understand.  Style has no place, other than it needs to be consistent.  Variable names shouldn’t confuse; they should instruct.

In this business, our source code always goes to the client in the end, who is going to have to live with it (hopefully forever!) and maintain it.  If it works, we have done a portion of our job.  If the client can easily read, understand, and modify as needed, we did the part of our job which shows the true skill.  It’s easy to make the machine do what you want it to.  The true craftsman can make the maintenance and understanding a delightful experience.

Bug Labs is a new kind of technology company, enabling a new generation of engineers to tap their creativity and build any type of device they want, without having to solder, learn solid state electronics, or go to China. Bug Labs envisions a future where CE stands for Community Electronics, the term “mashups” applies equally to hardware as it does to Web services, and entrepreneurs can appeal to numerous markets by inventing “The Long Tail” of devices.