Electric Infographics
March 25th, 2010
A few months back, when the first month of winter took its toll on my electric bill, I do what I normally do in situations like that: I looked for a geek solution.
Found this device that plugs into your circuit breaker and silently monitors how many kilowatts you use and when you use them. On top of that, once connected to your home network it provides live xml feeds of your usage. Jackpot!
The purchase was justified as an educational expense for my infographics class I’m taking in grad school, and motivated by my geeky love for manipulating and visualizing data.
It’s a work in progress, but here’s the visualizations I’ve got so far:
1. minute-by-minute grid
2. charts showing which hours of the day use the most energy
On the coding end, I’m bound and determined to avoid flash like the plague. I found Raphael, an amazing Javascript library that uses the html5 canvas to draw and animate vectors like flash+as3 does, but without the plugin (and thus iPhone compatible). jQuery makes parsing the xml easy, and allows the UI animation used in the second example above.
