James Smith

I was lucky enough to be invited to talk at the Reboot Britain conference on Monday. It was a fascinating day, with lots of inspiring moments. It left me with a feeling that we can make the world a better place if we all get out there and make things. It's something I already believed, but it's great to have a recharge every now and again.

My session was on hacking energy data, kind of a Homecamp intro for the uninitiated. My slides are up on Slideshare, and embedded here for your viewing pleasure. Hopefully at some point I'll get to re-record the audio and add it in.

The other day, I managed to get hold of a CurrentCost energy monitor (available to buy from here, or maybe from your electricity supplier). Now, the nice thing about this particular monitor (apart from the ton of information on-screen) is the fact that it has a serial output on the bottom, which you can (with a bit of hacking) plug into your PC, and - bingo - lovely XML data!

However, once you have it connected and spewing XML at you, you really need something to do with all that data. I don't have anything big written yet, but my first step towards making something useful is a Ruby gem, which is available from GitHub. So far it can only parse the XML data from the meter - direct access to the serial port is hopefully coming soon.

In other news, the AMEE gem I started a while ago is still coming on. It can now use the XML and JSON interfaces, parse the whole Data API, and retrieve a list of Profiles. Not a bad start.