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Announcing Home Camp 4 “Hack the House”
It’s time for another event!
Home Camp brings together members of the technical community interested in using open systems and low-cost, often repurposed hardware to bring about a positive change in the way we use energy and appliances around the home.
With ever-increasing energy prices, the race is on to develop ways to utilise smart technology to help offset domestic energy consumption and lower carbon footprints.
Home Camp 4 invites those working with technology (software, hardware or web-based applications) to meet at an informal “unconference” in central London to offer presentations, workshops, mash-ups and hack sessions with the aim of sharing information and furthering the development of the open energy community.
Presentations this year will include the following provisional topics:
- An Open Energy Monitor – Trystan Lea and Glyn Hudson
- A Low Voltage DC Power System – Simon Daniel or Chris Wright, Moixa Technology
- Nanode – an Open Hardware Success Story – Ken Boak, Arbour Wood Ltd.
- Pachube – Open Data for Energy Monitoring – Usman Haque, Pachube
The event will again take place at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, at 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (nearest tube is 500m away at Kings Cross)
This bright, modern venue offers ideal facilities both for presentations and working in small groups.
Lunch will be provided in the form of a buffet. Refreshments, including tea, coffee, soft drinks and beer will also be available.
Provisional Schedule
Saturday 29th October
09:30 Open for refreshments and meet and greet
10:00 Keynote presentation
10:30 Presentation Slot 1 – To be decided on the day
11:00 Presentation Slot 2
11:30 Presentation Slot 3
12:00 Morning workshop session 1
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Regroup and arrange Unconference – session 1
15:30 Refreshments
16:00 Unconference session 2
18:00 Day 1 de-brief
For those staying in London there will be an evening pub visit 
Sunday 30th October
09:30 Open for refreshments and meet and greet
10:00 Hacksession
10:30 Presentation Slot 1 – To be decided on the day
11:00 Presentation Slot 2
11:30 Presentation Slot 3
12:00 Morning workshop session 1
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Regroup and arrange Unconference – session 1
15:30 Refreshments
16:00 Unconference session 2
18:00 Day 2 de-brief
The cost is £10 per day, or £17.50 for the full weekend (plus booking fees) – to include lunch and refreshments.
Due to the capacity/safety limits at C4CC the event is restricted to a total of 95 attendees.
Want to get involved? Get your tickets on Eventbrite!
Once you’ve signed up we also invite you to contribute to the crowdsourced Lanyrd event page.
HomeCamp 3 programme – last few tickets
If you are quick, there’s just a little more time to grab one of the last few tickets (around 20 as i post this) for the event in London next Monday afternoon and evening.
We’ve got (more-or-less) full details for you now. The event is going to be a little different to the previous two, with some pre-arranged tracks due to the shortened timeslot not providing quite so much scope for the unconference format to work.
Homecamp 3 Presentation Track
4:00 – Registration
4:30 – Welcome and Introduction: James Governor, Co‐founder Redmonk
4.45 – Presentation Track: 3 speakers
6:15 – Break
6:30 – Presentation Track: 2 speakers
7:45 – Closing presentation
8:00 – Pub
Confirmed Speakers:
- Chris Dalby: Lead Software Developer, Current Cost
- Andy Piper: WebSphere Messaging Community Lead @ IBM
- Usman Haque: Pachube
- AMEE: James Smith: Lead Developer, Clients & Community @ AMEE
Mike’s GreenTech Spaces Spotlights
There will be a separate area with displays about GreenTech, HomeTech, HackSpaces & much more, run by MikeTheBee.
If you are creative, enjoy tech & automation or would like to meet up with those featured in Mike’s Podcast, this is your chance to get together, to socialise in a special space, to learn about what each does, the technology and how to create with it, to explore opportunities to collaborate for fun or the future. If you are a member of a group, please have someone bring info about your group for a display to represent your Space.
More Info
Beers & Pizza sponsored by Redmonk & Greenmonk – Thank You!
Contact @mikethebee @yellowpark or @monkchips on Twitter if you want to know more…
HomeCamp 3 – it’s coming – sign up now!
An exciting couple of weeks in the HomeCamp community as the rumours began to circulate on Twitter that MikeTheBee had pushed things forward and found a venue for HomeCamp 3. Mike is the man behind the HomeCamp podcast, so if you weren’t already subscribed to that, you should check it out!
So here’s the big reveal: HomeCamp 3 will be on December 13th 2010, 4-8pm at the Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC) in London. There are suggestions of an evening social gathering as well…
Mike posted a short note about the event in a comment here on the blog. The full announcement is posted in the Google Group. If you’ve never been to the venue before, Mike says:
… it is an a place with a real buzz, not for the building itself, which is intended to be ‘a blank canvas’ but for all the creative work going on in the corners. Electroluminescent clothing and Arduino controller being sewn in one corner, people bouncing on paving slabs to generate power in another, more Arduino’s controlling bits of a re-constructed piano awaiting it’s next performance, and there are always new surprises.
Sounds pretty cool! So, it’s all go. You can go ahead and sign up right now at the EventBrite page, and also track the event on the uber-cool new social conferences site, Lanyrd (you can also find HomeCamp 1 and HomeCamp 2 on Lanyrd as well, and add your coverage if you attended them).
While we’re in the mood, we’ve tidied up some of the web presences around the HomeCamp community, fixed the About page, the links in the blog sidebar have been updated to point at the current location of the wiki, Flickr group etc, and we’ll probably switch across to a funky new Facebook page (instead of a group) in the near future.
So – check out the discussions, follow the tweets, and most importantly, get your free ticket NOW. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Reducing emissions by 10% in 2010? 10:10
Here’s a campaign that should be of interest to all friends of HomeCamp – it’s a site and movement devoted to encouraging us as individuals (as well as organisations, educational institutions, and businesses) to cut emissions by 10% during 2010. It’s called, fittingly, 10:10. It’s an organisation concentrating on change in the UK, but they have information for those outside the UK who are interested in following the same idea. Still not sure what this is all about? from the website:
What is 10:10?
10:10 is an ambitious project to unite every sector of British society behind one simple idea: that by working together we can achieve a 10% cut in the UK’s carbon emissions in 2010.
The sign-up process is simple, there’s a nice checklist of things you can do to reduce your footprint/emissions (including, of course, the energy-saving projects we at HomeCamp have been talking about for some time), and it’s easy to encourage your local MP to take part too.
Useful links and news stories
The HomeCamp community is continuing to keep up with the most recent developments of interest in sustainability and home hacking.
One good place to start is the “Links of Interest” page on the Google Group. Another good way of keeping up-to-date with what others are spotting is the #homecamp hashtag on Twitter (personally I keep a search column open in TweetDeck to keep an eye on this, too).
Here’s a selection of things I’ve spotted in the past couple of months:
- Dennis Howlett made a great series of videos with James, Chris and Mark Charmer about energy saving strategies, tweeting houses and the HomeCamp concept.
- Benjamin Ellis investigated how to save on standby power on his blog and via YouTube.
- keynote speaker at the first HomeCamp, Andy Stanford-Clark, has been in the press a lot lately, with more about the Twitter capabilities of his house (and the infamous mousetraps) – it has now earned its own page of press links on his site.
- ReadWriteWeb posted about home automation using iobridge and Twitter.
If you have something to share, get in touch with us via Twitter or our Google Group.
Mission statement ideas
I got to thinking that it would be useful to have a pithy description of what Home Camp is all about.
Here’s a starting thought:
The home hacking, automation and green technology community
Let’s crowdsource this, though – I think that’s a nice short statement which describes what Home Camp covers without being either too exclusive, or specifically inclusive – but maybe other people have additions, changes, etc.?
Home Camp TV – what’s next? you decide!
So our initial series of Home Camp TV videos has now been published. What did you think? We’d love to hear your feedback, either on this post, the blog entries for the individual videos themselves, or over on YouTube.
Although we started this as part of the Friday Morning Report video marathon, it has been fun to put together. I’d be happy to produce some more episodes if there’s enough interest.
So… let us know what you think, what ideas you have for future episodes, what you want to hear about… it’s all about the community! Also, remember to visit the Home Camp wiki to add ideas for discussion at future meetups.
Home Camp TV – Current Cost live demo
Another Current Cost hack… Rich Cumbers and Dale Lane built the Current Cost Live application as part of Mashed 08 last year. I talked to Rich about the idea behind the application – mashing up the gaming concept from XBox Live and using competitiveness to drive down home energy usage.
Home Camp TV – discussion with an enthusiast
Last week I chatted on the phone with one of the attendees from Home Camp 08, Chris Hodgins. During the conversation we talked about his experience of Home Camp, his expectations of what might happen in the future, and how he became interested in the whole home automation and monitoring space.
Thanks very much for your time, Chris!
Home Camp TV – demo of a desktop application
In today’s episode of Home Camp TV, I interview Dale Lane, one of the organisers of the first Home Camp event and an active hacker on all sorts of projects, which you can read about on his blog. Dale showed me his very nice desktop application for analysing energy usage, which includes some interesting features such as the ability to watch usage against the overall National Grid consumption.
Find Dale’s Current Cost GUI app on Google Code.
Home Camp TV – Martin Dix interview
This week, Chris and I have been putting together some videos for what we’re calling “Home Camp TV” – originally intended to be a segment on the Friday Morning Report 24 hour marathon, which has sadly been postponed (get well soon, Craig!). So for now, we’re posting these videos individually… they should appear in the Friday Morning Report slot later as well. You can still contribute to Craig’s charity drive, which is already very close to target.
The first Home Camp TV video is a brief chat with Martin Dix from CurrentCost about how the company’s technology is moving forward. Keep an eye on the blog for a few more episodes over the coming days!
Bonus link – you can read a little bit more about Martin’s visit to Hursley and see photos on eightbar.
Google joins the power monitoring party
In case you don’t follow the #homecamp tweets on Twitter… you may not have noticed that Google announced their new PowerMeter tool, which plays in the same space as a lot of technologies that we talked about at HomeCamp 08 (Pachube, CurrentCost, Wattson and so on). It’s great to see that so many people are beginning to realise the benefits of smart metering and understanding personal energy utilisation
The first Home Camp: looking back, and looking forward
Huge thanks to everyone who attended the first ever Home Camp event, which took place last Saturday at Imperial College London. Very special thanks have to go to our sponsors, Greenmonk and Current Cost, and to the Electrical Engineering Society at Imperial College who provided the venue for the event, which was just superb.
One aspect about the event that was particularly great was the diversity of interests and talents amongst the attendees. It was really a coming together of minds on energy efficiency, green computing, environmental awareness and home automation. It’s exciting to imagine where these thoughts can take us.
In case you missed it, or if you want to revisit the events of the day, we have a number of videos now online, and several folks have blogged and posted photos. If you have got content to share, we encourage you to tag it “homecamp08″ so that people can aggregate images on Flickr, or blog posts etc. (incidentally, if you also tag Flickr images with “upcoming:event=1304370″ then they will be linked with the Upcoming event).
Videos
Andy Stanford-Clark’s opening talk about his automated house is up on Viddler (about 30 minutes long):
Feedback from attendees can be found at Greenmonk and on Vimeo, along with a bonus video of James Governor helping to shape the agenda for the day’s talks. Archived videos from the live stream are on Ustream. (unfortunately it is not possible to embed these here, so follow the links for full details)
Write-ups
As of the time of writing a number of people have produced blog posts about their experiences – thanks for the feedback!
- Nick O’Leary
- Phoebe Bright
- Andy Piper
- Tom Taylor
- Andrew Whitehouse
- Dale Lane
- Jamie Ingilby
- Adrian McEwen
- Daniel Would
In other news:
- We have a new domain – http://homecamp.org.uk will direct you here to the blog. We still have the wiki where we can gather ideas for future events, and the discussion group on Google.
- The current plan is for a second event in March 2009!
- We have a FriendFeed room for gathering links and useful information.
Home Camp is a community-run event so we’re keen to look at new ideas and share code and information – look out for more over the coming months and feel free to get involved.
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