After completing the WS-Policy Round 1 implementation a few weeks ago and getting pulled in to more WS-Policy stuff at work I was looking for another spare time project. About then, Rich told me about the CurrentCost device he had set up and it seemed like a fun thing to work on.
We had a tweetup at work where it seemed like lots of the problems were already solved…. so, being that I was looking for a fun challenge, I’ve ignored all that for a few of weeks, bought a device independently, built a cable, and this bank holiday weekend connected it to a slug, written a really suspect python script to read the data from the device and publish it to an illsley.org XMPP id. I’ve also written an XMPP client which is running on a box at work retrieving the data and putting it into a .csv file. One of the good things about using an illsley.org XMPP id is that the google backend records all the messages so I could not have the client and extract the data from google later.
Even that’s not ideal, so the other options I’m planning to explore are Amazon SQS and Amazon SimpleDB, before probably caving and recognising that the MQTT solution is best and asking the guys at work nicely if I can properly participate.
There are lots of interesting things to do with the data, which I’ll start to play with once I have a meaningful volume of it. One possibility which surfaced this week when I saw an internal demo is snaffling an early build of WebSphere Business Events and seeing what interesting things it can do with power usage events.
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