How to hook up a Current Cost energy meter to tweet the energy usage of your home or office. Understanding the actual levels of energy we use can help us Plug Out and do the Green Thing.

1. Twitterplug
How to Tweet the energy usage of your
home of office with the Current Cost meter
Dothegreenthing.com

2. What You Need
• Current Cost Meter (http://www.currentcost.com)
• Mac or Linux PC*
*NB. Mac and Linux have different instructions
Dothegreenthing.com

3. Linux
• Before we start you will need to install James Smith's
(http://www.floppy.org.uk) rb232 Ruby gem
(http://github.com/Floppy/rb232/tree/master)
• Then put your Current Cost meter together
Dothegreenthing.com

4. Step Two
• Plug everything in an attach the clamps around
a cable
Dothegreenthing.com

5. Step Three
• Download James' daemon from here:
http://github.com/Floppy/currentcost-daemon/tree/master
Dothegreenthing.com

6. Step Four
• Run the program and watch your Tweets stream in
Dothegreenthing.com

7. Mac OS X
• We couldn't get James' rb232 code to work, so
we're going to go a different route...
• First install PL2302 drivers for your mac
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/drivers/pl2303usbtoserialdriver.html
Dothegreenthing.com

8. Step Two
• Same as with Linux, plug everything in and attach
the clamps
Dothegreenthing.com

9. Step Three - Oops, A Problem
• Unfortunately, we couldn't get James' rb 232 code
to work on OSX, but we found another way...
• The plan is to:
– Have the data sent off to Pachube (using a
Pachube app)
– Have a script that will pull the data off Pachube
and then post this on Twitter
Dothegreenthing.com

10. Step Four
– Sign up to Pachube (http://www.pachube.com)
– Create a Feed
Dothegreenthing.com

11. Step Five
• Download this app
http://community.pachube.com/?q=node/100
Dothegreenthing.com

12. And Finally
• Download and run this code
• http://gist.github.com/89139
Dothegreenthing.com

13. Good luck, happy Twitterplugging and
let us know how you get on
hello@dothegreenthing.com
Dothegreenthing.com