Build a Tweet-a-Watt for Homes

The project intends to build a wireless home-power monitoring system that can measure the power usage on a long term basis.

Some steps need to be followed when making the tweet-a-watt setup and they include the preparation of everything needed for building the project, building the receiver setup, configuring the XBee wireless modems, building the transmitter setup, running the software, and expanding and extending the setup.

During the data listening and parsing, the receiver software will take a receiver XBee and find out what the sensor data means. A scripting language such as python was used to write the code which runs on all operating systems. The raw data from the XBee is obtained and the packet format is published and kept in the XBee library. The data is normalized by normalizing the Current measurements.

For long-term analysis, a database is created that stores the power usage. The trends in the power usage can be understood with the help of graphs. The data from the XBee modem inside the kill-a-watt is obtained every few seconds. All the sensor data for 5 minutes were added up and the average is taken.

Rest of the project