Trustworthy Systems

e4meter: Power management for the people

Authors

Etienne Le Sueur and Bernard Blackham

NICTA, Sydney, Australia
UNSW, Australia

Abstract

The cost of power is important both in terms of your quarterly power bill and the effect of its generation on the environment. Raising awareness of power consumption at the consumer level is the first in a number of steps required to constrain our ever growing lust for electricity.

The e4Meter is an intelligent device designed to measure and control the power consumption of every-day consumer appliances. With its four individually metered and controlled outlets, you can monitor the power consumption of four discrete appliances or groups of appliances.

The e4Meter is also network-connected and with its web interface you can control, monitor power consumption, view power consumption history and do much more. The core behind the e4Meter is the Lantronix XPort Pro, running uClinux on a Coldfire microprocessor.

This talk will discuss the motivation behind the e4Meter, go into a little bit of technical detail about its construction, and how to use the device to its maximum potential. We will also discuss the way we've used Linux to build the software around this device.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{LeSueur_Blackham_11,
    address          = {Brisbane, Australia},
    author           = {Le Sueur, Etienne and Bernard Blackham},
    booktitle        = {Linux.conf.au},
    month            = jan,
    title            = {{e}4Meter: Power Management for the People},
    video            = {https://youtu.be/aveGnYa6_xU},
    year             = {2011}
  }

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