Collaborate Disseminate
Energy is expensive these days. There’s no getting around it. If, like [Giovanni], you want to keep better track of your usage, you might find value in his DIY energy …read more Continue reading Balancing Balls With A Touchpad
PiggyMeter is a wonderful example of a device that you never knew you needed – simple, elegant, easy to build, and accompanied by amazing documentation. It’s a snap-on interface for …read more Continue reading Simple Optical Meter Sets New Standards For Documentation
In most places around the world, electricity is getting ever more expensive. Cutting back on your usage is one of the easier ways to escape this pain. This smart powermeter …read more Continue reading Smart Powermeter Uses E-Paper Display
Measuring a voltage is pretty easy: just place your multimeter’s probes across the relevant pins and read the value. Probing currents is a bit trickier, since you need to open …read more Continue reading Hackaday Prize 2023: Pi Pico Measures Volts, Amps and Watts
You may have seen some of the EEVblog dumpster dive videos, where [Dave Jones] occasionally finds perfectly good equipment that’s been tossed out. But this time, rather than a large …read more Continue reading Experimenting with 20 Meters of Outlet Adapters
There was an urban legend back in the days of mechanical electricity meters, that there were “lucky” appliances that once plugged in would make the meter go backwards. It probably …read more Continue reading Electromagnetic Interference For Fun And Profit
There are a lot of good reasons to have a better understanding of one’s household power use, and that is especially true for those that do their own solar power …read more Continue reading Live Energy Monitor Helps Plan Power-Hungry Appliance Use
If you’be been hacking and making long enough, you’ve probably run into a situation where you realize that a previous project could be improved with the addition of technology that simply wasn’t available when you built it. Sometimes it means starting over from scratch, but occasionally you luck out and can shoehorn in some new gear without having to go back to the drawing board.
The two isolated variacs that [nop head] built were already impressive, but with the addition of the ESP8266 he was able to add some very slick additional features which really took them to the next …read more
Going from idea to one-off widget is one thing; engineering the widget into a marketable product is quite another. So sometimes it’s instructive to take an in-depth look at a project that was designed from the get-go to be a consumer product, like this power indicating wall outlet cover plate. The fact that it’s a pretty cool project helps too.
Although [Vitaliy] has been working on this project for a while, he only recently tipped us off to it, and we’re glad he did because there’s a lot to learn here. His goal was to build a replacement cover for …read more
Continue reading Smart Outlet Cover Offers Lessons on Going from Project to Product
[k-roy] hates electricity. Especially the kind that can be lethal if you’re not careful. Annoyed by the constant advertisements for the popular Sense Home Energy monitors (which must be installed in the main breaker box by an electrician), [k-roy] set out to find a cheaper and easier way. He wondered how the power company monitored his meter, and guessed correctly that it must be transmitting the information wirelessly. Maybe he could just listen in?
Using a cheap RTL-SDR, it didn’t take long for [k-roy] to tap into this transmission and stumbled across the power readings for his entire neighborhood using …read more
