{"id":283,"date":"2008-06-23T21:05:49","date_gmt":"2008-06-23T21:05:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=283"},"modified":"2008-06-23T21:35:40","modified_gmt":"2008-06-23T21:35:40","slug":"our-mashed-08-hack-currentcost-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=283","title":{"rendered":"Our Mashed 08 hack: CurrentCost Live"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was the end of Mashed 08<\/a> – the annual London hackday from BBC Backstage<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I saw last week<\/a> that there was going to be a “social responsibility” category in the hack challenge<\/a>, and decided that a CurrentCost hack was in order!<\/p>\n

Together with Rich<\/a>, we spent a day trying to hack together a competitive challenge based around CurrentCost, encouraging people to reduce their home electricity usage by making it into a game they can play with their friends.<\/p>\n

Here are a few notes based on the presentation I gave at the end. <\/p>\n

\"CurrentCost<\/a>To start, a little background. This is my electricity meter at home.<\/p>\n

The device attached to it is a CurrentCost meter<\/a>. It’s an inductive loop that goes around a cable into my electric meter. Every six seconds it measures the amount of electricity I’m using at home.
\n

\n\"CurrentCost<\/a>The large black box contains a transmitter, which is used to send the meter readings to this – the display unit.<\/p>\n

This shows you the reading – so you can see at a glance how much electricity you are using.
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\n<\/a>We’ve had these meters for a few weeks now, and what has made them more interesting is the port underneath. <\/p>\n

Connect a serial cable to the port and you can get the electric meter readings in XML form<\/a>. <\/p>\n

With friends and colleagues at work, we’ve been playing with different things that we can do with this data.
\n

\n\"tweaking<\/a>For example, last week I made a start on a Windows GUI for the CurrentCost data<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Each new update can be shown as a new bar, with graphs for hourly, daily and monthly totals.<\/p>\n

A group of us at work<\/a> have worked on an infrastructure that lets us upload our meter readings to a broker out there on the Internet.
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

\"First<\/a>One of the first uses of this was a way to display real-time graphs of each house’s electricity usage online.<\/p>\n

But with all of our readings in one place, we can start making more interesting uses of the data. And this is where we were when we arrived at Mashed.<\/p>\n

The idea was to create a game based on the data. We’re both XBox 360 owners<\/a> and one way that XBox encourages people to play is through XBox Live<\/a>. <\/p>\n

<\/a>Firstly, it has ‘Achievements’. <\/p>\n

Instead of just scores, they set challenges that you can work towards.
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\n<\/a>And it’s social. <\/p>\n

You don’t just look at your own score, you look at your score compared with those of your friends. <\/p>\n

You don’t just see if you’ve completed an achievement, you see which completed compared with your friends. <\/p>\n



\nIt makes games more interesting and engaging, and provides an incentive to try harder. We thought we’d try and copy that approach with the CurrentCost data.<\/p>\n

There are a number of achievements we could define:<\/p>\n