Two years ago I had a first experience with a device that enabled me to monitor my power consumption habits per equipment. It was very educational and enabled me to switch off and remove some less efficient equipments which were basically vampire equipments. Unfortunantely the device can only monitor one equipment at a time and has no interface through which to get data out.

Leaping two years time, I’ve recently received a contact from ISA to became one of their beta testers for their iMeter product. In no time I received an iMeter Kit such as the one on the image.

The Kit comes with a clamp which needs to be installed in your house power distribution unit (after your energy meter) and a transmitter that has an internal battery.

The clamp and the transmitter were very easy to setup since my power distribution unit had plenty of space. In the event that I might need to check the transmitter, I decided to keep it on the outside of the power distribution unit although it is still protected by the unit’s front cover.

The supplied kit has two other devices: a display unit which can be used to measure energy consumption in almost realtime (~6sec) and an iMeterBox which connects to the internet and to ISA’s enerbook.pt website where a log of my power consumption is stored in periods of 1 hour averages. Both the display and the iMeterBox are very easy to setup as they automagically detect the transmitter via RF (Zigbee?) and start displaying/publishing my power consumption (this actually leaves me with some doubts related to security and privacy of the system) and the iMeterBox that is connected to my home router uses dhcp (I’ve not seen any way of configuring a fixed IP address in the equipment, although it has an admin webpage). The website needs nothing more than a user registration (username/password) and the S/N of the iMeterbox to associate to the enerbook.pt account (multiple iMeterbox’s can be associated to a given account).

The website is very friendly and to my surprise produces graphs using JS and Canvas (no flash there!). It can be used to monitor daily, monthly and yearly consumptions as well as to compare any two days, months or years. This is actually one of the points that in my view needs improvements, since it is very inflexible the configuration of time periods to visually monitor (e.g. most obvious time period to monitor is a week). Good thing is that you can export to XLS format and do your own data processing.

In the period of one week I’ve detect several devices in my house which were power vampires (namely an oven that consumed 60W and ZON HD+DVR which accounted for extra 70W). By switching off these devices completely I’ve been able to reduce my standby power usage (period of time where I’m not at home or asleep) by 20%. This value clearly show’s the potential of this equipment in terms of power saving.

In summary: the iMeter is a great product, but still has plenty of room for improvement.

But here I am, reporting on the conclusion of C-Cast.

Last week I was in Florence, Italy (so far the city I most enjoyed in Italy) in the Future Network & Mobile Summit, during which we presented C-Cast publicly through a workshop and demonstration booth.

In the days preceding the conference, we were audited by the European Commission with a final result of “Good to excellent progress (the project has fully achieved its objectives and technical goals for the period and has even exceeded expectations).“, plus we were considered the best “run up demo” in the conference.

Like in C-Mobile we produced a video, also presented in Florence, that gain the attention of both the reviewers and conference attendees.

In the past I’ve tried the Get Things Done (GTD) methodology and quickly dropped it. I found that by focusing in a single task I was missing important deadlines. Furthermore it became obvious to me that my list was growing and not shrinking. On the other hand, I do find it important to properly manage my time.

Back to Alfredo’s post: I’ve been running something very similar with a good degree of success, although I’m not radical enough to remove the network cable as I still depend on the network to get my work done, and do get several emails during the day that require my immediate attention. That said my “standard” workday looks like:

• Read all email + twitter (I only follow a very limited number of people and constantly purge some of them now and then) + limited number of blogs through an RSS reader (leaving most of them for later reading)
• Exit all non essential applications (echofon, NetNewsWire) and IM accounts (gtalk, facebook) – At this moment I have only email and “work” IM.
• Work the morning through
• Lunch
• Check twitter + Some of the blogs
• Work the afternoon
• Home
• Babysit my child until she is put to bed
• Read everything pending
• Sleep

The idea is to build something resembling this or this without leaving my pocket empty, and in the time between build something with my bare-hands.

So today I set things in motion by visiting InMotion in it’s office in Oporto where I met Filipe Valpereiro. There I picked up an Arduino Duemilanove and an Ethernet Shield to go with. Tomorrow I hope to drop by the local electronics shop to pickup a photodiode and an IR LED. That should account for all the hardware I need in this project.

After that I will need to learn a bit about the IR encodings used by the remote controllers in the household (TV + Home Theater + STB). Luckily I’ve an oscilloscope lying around from the days my father did real electronics, which should come in hand to debug everything.

As soon as I get something working I’ll post it here.

That said, the family decided it was time to get some help, and we rushed to buy a Robot Vacuum Cleaner in order to get an “extra hand”. Some of you might say it was an impulse buy, and you are probably right… but the truth is: it is already paying off.

I bought the Roomba 555, which can only be found in Europe but is equivalent to the 560 model. I bought this model instead of the cheaper 520 model because I wanted the possibility to schedule the Roomba to operate while we are off at work.

After an initial overnight battery charge we were set to give the Roomba chore: while me and my wife where handling meals (our’s and daughter’s) the Roomba was set out to vacuum the other rooms.

I must say that expectations weren’t either very high nor low… I knew it wouldn’t clean all spots but I did expect it to clean well those it could reach. My furniture disposition was slightly changed in order to make sure the Roomba didn’t miss as many spots (basically made room for the Roomba to reach every corner by displacing furniture a few centimeters).

The results were pretty good, although not as powerful as a common vacuum cleaner the Roomba was able to pickup all the dust in the floor (both wooden and tile floors which included rugs in both environments).

So far my only disappointment with the Roomba is that it fills up too quickly. Fortunately its quite easy to remove the dirt from the Roomba (same can’t be said of the hairs that get stuck in the brushes of the Roomba), and since there is no bag it is an economic task to clear the contents of the bin often.

Overall I think it is a great investment in your personal/family time.

I was probably a bit nervous as the defense was about the start, as shown in the above picture. The defense started with a 30 min delay, as one my jury member was held in traffic. But in 2h30m time I would be out of the room with boosting confidence levels, as I had finally successfully completed one my most important milestones.

Today I concluded a path, which started 5 years ago when I accepted the challenge of my supervisor to conduct research in an area that was then not very clear if it would become the next hit or flop in Telecom. Today we have very successful IPTV services and operators that cover several technologies (which include broadcast) under a single service platform.

I don’t think my research work in the area is done, far from that, I still believe much needs to be done and changed in the Telecom industry in order to survive in this century without becoming a fossil. But I leave all my new ideas to projects to come

I had in the audience many of my friends and most importantly my family that got me through to this important moment of my life and career. A thank you to all of them.

Throughout the course of these ~5 years I’ve participated in several EU projects such as IST-Daidalos and IST-C-Mobile in which I shared knowledge and experience with partners from all over Europe. To them, my sincere thank you.

As I close this chapter, a new chapter opens in which I aspire to overcome more challenges. For starters, I’m currently concluding project ICT-C-Cast, and really soon will start with a new project called MEDIEVAL.

Since I haven’t done any exercise since summer, my legs are very sore (can’t wait for tomorrow, when they will feel completely numb). But hopefully I will be back in shape in no time, in order to start doing more appealing tracks offroad.

An interesting side effect of these bike rides is that I’m taking a GPS with me that enables me to log the track. This information is very useful for the OpenStreetMap Project that requires your GPS logs to build a free geographic data repository (resembling Google Maps and Bing Maps). I’ve already contributed to the project in the summer, mapping some streets in Aveiro, but lots of places are still missing information.

My challenge is for you to take your GPS along with you next time you go out and upload back your tracks into OpenStreetMap.

I keep a Time Machine backup, and could have used it to move all my files to the new system. But since I had to many things installed which I don’t use anymore, I decided to move just my personal settings to the new system.

This constituted a great opportunity to list the applications I consider essential:

• 1 Password
• Adium
• Flip4Mac
• git
• Growl
• Handbrake
• KisMAC
• Freemind
• MacPorts
• NetNewsWire
• Office 2008
• Papers
• Perian
• Seashore
• Skype
• Telephone
• VLC
• VMWare Fusion
• Wireshark
• XCode

And had to leave GPGMail out (no snow leopard version currently available)

The question now is: What am I missing ?

This has suddenly become my second city, since this year I’ve spent more time in Berlin then in Faro, Portugal…

I’m back in Fokus for the final meeting of project C-Cast. And as I prepare to leave, I know that I’ll be back in the beginning of next year for the project Workshop were we will be doing demos of the work done.

Unfortunately I’ve never took some days off to properly explore the city, one of these trips I must bring my family with me and show them around this great city.

Been quite busy in the last weeks…

I’ve finally submitted my Phd thesis (more on that in another post), and been quite busy preparing project proposals for FP7 Call 5.

But I still had time to register for this year Codebits 2009. This year it will be held in Cordoaria Nacional.

Hope to meet you there!