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.

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…

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!

I just wanted to touch base and let you know some plans I have, and to
make sure they won’t upset the community, which is of course the most
important HomeCamp asset.

I believe I mentioned to the group before that I think we can
professionalise HomeCamp – indeed it will be hard to sustain it
otherwise. Camps 1 and 2 were very time consuming for Chris and me to
organise. With Chris now employed by Current Cost, running events will
be even harder.

Clearly the community has a mind and a spirit of its own – mike the
bee stands out as a stalwart for his work on the podcasts and so on.

So here is the plan. I have spoken to Tinkerit about a partnership.
Georgina Voss is really great at all the admin and operations stuff I
am notably crap at. The idea is we will look to run HomeCamp3 in the
Autumn with a v similar format to the first two- with sponsorship
being a matter of beer and pizza. Aim for 100 people again.

But then in the Spring we’ll run the first “professional” HomeCamp -
aiming for 250 delegates, with significant sponsorship.

All things being equal that will be the basis for an ongoing event
series (which may also syndicate in the US), which will remain free to
you, will be more high profile, will include more policy work (such as
for example focusing on inclusiveness and smarter homes- how can we
help gran and grandad to run energy efficient homes and understand
what utilities are telling them?), more partners- folks such as Arqiva
and Greenwave reality, MS and GE, with any luck.

My proposal then it to keep it free for you all, make companies pay,
and hopefully foster and grow the HomeCamp community as we see more
and more lower power homes coming on stream.

Obviously there may be opportunities to share some of the proceeds -
thus for example if Mike The Bee is the ongoing podcast king, he
should get a bung.

Would love your thoughts and ideas. Perhaps a beer meetup soon to
discuss?

• Over at the Guardian, Adam Vaughan has been finding PowerMeter easy to use if a bit of a shock to the system. Admittedly, seeing your electricity consumption on iGoogle at 8am on a cold winter morning might not be best way to start the day. But I’m with Adam on the big question – how can we start to share this data socially?
• Europe has plans for a super grid linking renewable power supplies which could weather proof our future energy supply.
• Over in the US and Canada, Oracle Utilities are touting for clients. A new report, ‘Testing the Water’, highlights consumer demand for more sophisticated information about their water use and water conservation. Smart meters could have a role to play here although utilities companies are unsurprisingly moving slowly due to concerns about the costs of implementation.
• @andypiper tell’s us that Intel have been showcasing a glitzy Atom-powered home monitor system. I’ve got to say, from just a glance at the screen shots, I want one. Judging from the slavering comments on this page, everyone else pretty much agrees. Shame it’s all still in the dream sphere.
• Grassroots home energy monitoring of the kind we HomeCampers love – Say hello to the Picowatt, a Wi-Fi enabled smart plug developed by Tenrehte Technologies that can provide just the same amount of consumption crunching love as you’d get from your smart meter
• Meanwhile, UK start-up PassivSystems have launched their home automation system at CES Unveiled. By learning from your regular behaviour, PassivEnergy will automatically control your energy consumption so that it is more efficient, cheaper & carbon cutting.
• The latest step on the path to Google world domination was taken with the announcement of Google Energy. Good Google says this is to help meet their corporate carbon reduction goals. But over on the other shoulder, Scary Google may be hatching evil plans to move into utilities, despite denials to the contrary. Anyone feeling complacent about Google’s increasingly godlike powers over our digital lives should read @benjaminellis’s blog about a week without Google.
• And finally, if you haven’t already spotted it, check out the below blog post about the HomeCamp meetup tonight at the Windmill near Old Street.

So Wednesday 20th January at the Windmill Pub in Epworth Street, London, UK.  3 or 4 minutes from Old Street Tube station (Northern Line) and free WIFI.  About 6.30 / 7pm till 8pm?  Ideas on this time please folks.

Here is a google map of the location

If you are thinking of coming along, please leave a comment on this blog.

Signup at Eventbrite

Where?

Held at the Horse and Groom pub, 28 Curtain Road, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3NZ

3pm – midnight

Nearest tube: Liverpool Street – Map

The Christmas Lights Hack Competition

We’re running a competition for the best Christmas lights hack.  So bring along your prototypes with a chance to win prizes from tinker.it and Current Cost.

Our Sponsors

The Home Camp Christmas Party sponsors are Redmonk, Rabbit MQ, Current Cost and Onzo.  We have a free bar until the budget runs out, so arrive early for free beer!

• Living in the USA? Clean tech jobs and big investment are coming to a state near you.
• The government outlines their thinking on smart meters for every home by 2020 – includes £6m earmarked to help suppliers develop smart technology – not quite on the level of the US investment, but a start. The question most often raised is how smart are the government being in their introduction of smart tech? Notably…
• While I’m never a fan of the Daily Fail, it’s interesting to see what the backlash against smart meters is going to look like. Cost to the consumer is the major concern. Is the government’s reliance on competition between energy suppliers to drive down costs passed on to consumers enough?
• A nation of power stations? A fair proportion of energy production is going to go local over the next ten years. Smart meters should include a measurement of power fed back into the grid in order to maximise their usefulness.
• Why China is going to implement the smart grid quicker than India. A more in depth analysis of the Beijing smart grid conference can be found here – particularly interesting to hear the view of wind power as clean energy but dirty technology.
• This comment on a recent survey of US and Canadian consumers shows there’s agreement across the pond that the mass roll out of smart meters won’t work without accompanying consumer education. So how best to facilitate that?

Tweet your preference to @ohrworm, reply in the comments here or let us know on the Google Group. Whatever does it for you, just make sure you let us know if you want to come any play…

Interesting stuff on the web this week:

• Obama pledges $3.4 billion investment to galvanise the transition to a smart energy grid.
• Google PowerMeter arrives in the UK with a new utility partnership, first:utility, and a new device partnership, AlertMe. The AlertMe device looks nice and easy to use but does come with a sneaky £3/month subscription fee for hosting the data.
• An exciting new partnership between Fat Spaniel technologies and Tendril Networks will result in solar powered houses automatically managing electricity usage in response to the sun’s intensity.
• Sacramento Municipal Utility Department’s Communications Director, Elizabeth Brinton, envisages that the smart grid will enable utilities companies to offer tailor made customer packages to consumers.
• Over on the GreenMonk blog @tomraftery has got his energy chat hat on – check out his take on how utilities companies can use smart meters to generate alternative revenue streams. I’m betting the Spanish version would have involved many more exclamation marks!!!
• And if you haven’t already, check out @edent’s blog about his experiences setting up and using the HummEnergy Duet.
   

Saturday, 24 October 2009 BarCampLondon7: Energy Efficiency & Usage Monitoring

Nigel Crawley

• digital meter — LED flashes fast or slow depending on how much electricity you use
• can pick that up with an arduino with wifi and then make available as EEML
• EEML (eeml.org) — XML for electricity cost
  • can humm output eeml?
• can then input into Pachube
• can then do visualization like this:
• lilypad arduino — can sew into clothes
  • can include a vibra-ball
• can recognise individual devices by whole home electricity usage
  • fridge, kettle, toaster, electric oven
• Tom Raftery — greenmonk.net
  • devices using too much electricity — an organisation will offer to replace it and tell you the savings
  • Camden, New Jersey: government offers subsidies on lower energy appliances
• visualisations:
  • one for schools that showed a polar bear running out of iceberg
  • DisplayLink have done a blog post on energy visualisation

Gbenga Kogbe

• the UK will run out of energy by 2014… we must save
• comparing with your neighbours
• mancini project — plug by plug usage
• there was some effort in the Zigbee standard — all appliances would publish their usage to a standard hub
• energyhive provided reduced price meters
  • research that came out showed that by the end of the trial, loads of meters were in the drawer and not used
  • several 1000 homes included in trial
• putting information online and sharing it is much more effective than a little meter in the corner
• in some places, there are dynamic tariffs
  • would like to tell dishwasher to wash when it’s cheap
  • not in the UK…
  • energy providers buy at realtime, but sell at flat rate
• Dale Lane: energy costs vary between 2p and £3 a unit!!
  • it’s in their interest to get us to use it at the right times
• base electricity is provided by nuclear power
• peak is provided by hydro
• DynamicDemand.co.uk: figure out national supply by checking frequency
  • brownouts caused by frequency going too low
  • looking at making fridges turn themselves off when the frequency is lower
  • if all fridges did this, then peaks would be made less
  • see also caniturniton.com
• in California they have battery farms (since the 80s)
• solar panels are less efficient in the heat…
  • they get powered by light, not heat
• bike generators:
  • bikes available for free — have generators
  • when they are parked, they provide their power for the local buses

• Microsoft positions itself as the platform that can integrate smart energy tech with SERA.
• Germany takes a giant leap into the energy revolution with, among other grand plans, the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology’s E-Energy scheme. Billed as “intelligent networking of energy generation, distribution and consumption”, 6 projects are being piloted which place the empowered consumer at the heart of the energy marketplace. You can check out the full E-Energy story here (PDF alert!).
• Google PowerMeter get the energy detectives on the case with the TED 5,000 partnership.  Thanks @divydovy for flagging that one up.
• The Guardian gets excited about a new smart meter from Intelligent Sustainable Energy. Any Oxford Home Campers had a sneak peek at this one?
• And it looks like the Home Camp concept has caught on over the pond. The premier conference eh? I guess that makes us the protopremier unconference.

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.

We all love IBM’s Andy Stanford Clark, the seed around which the HomeCamp community initially crystallised, so we’re very happy to have him posting here.

I gave a talk at HomeCamp’08, telling everyone about my home automation system, energy monitoring, and of course my electronic mousetraps. I thought it was time for an update. More recently I’ve linked my automated home up to Twitter, so I get an ambient, background, sense of what’s happening at home, and home much power we’re using.
Like for example, every five pounds worth of electricity each month I get a twitter message. When the phone rings, I get a direct message from twitter to my phone as an SMS, telling me who called, so I can decided whether to call them back.

This recently picked up quite a lot of media attention, and my house appeared on the BBC News – here’s Rory Cellan-Jones’ blog about it -  Things That Tweet and here’s the news piece that went out on BBC and a few other places round the world.

Richard MacManus recently wrote in ReadWriteWeb about the “Internet of Things“, the House that Twitters, and the IBM vision of a Smarter Planet, that is Instrumented, Interconnected and Intelligent. That’s what it’s all about, and that’s why HomeCamp, and the great community around it, are so important.

And of course, as we move outwards from the home, into the Smart energy grid, we have to work out how to integrate micro-generation capabilities – wind and solar at people’s houses, and manage the recharging of hybrid and electric vehicles. Having everything fitted with sensors, talking to the internet, and applying significant compute power to make sense of that sea of data, becomes increasingly essential to running the system efficiently. This is described in an article in the Guardian recently.

photo credit Benjamin Ellis.

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.

It all started one drunken night a few years ago with my neighbours in the garden (as do most life-changing events I’m assured). It appeared that they were all paying an awful lot less for their electricity than me which I found confusing as we lived in similar houses.

Electrisave

After some investigation I discovered the Electrisave (since rebranded as the OWL). £45 later and I had fitted the clamp ammeter to my main feed into the house and was going round the house switching things on and off to see how much they cost. Hours of endless fun, no seriously!

I quickly worked out that my house idled at about 3.4p/hr unless the fridge/freezer was cycling when it hit 5.5p/hr. This small nugget alone dramatically changed household behaviour. Everyone was trained that as we went to sleep, or before we left the house, to check the meter. If it was more than 5.5p/hr then something was on that shouldn’t be and was switched on. Already my bills started to drop by about £10-£15/month.

Then one night I am sitting by the TV, with the meter in front of me (I became sadly obsessed) when it jumped up by 30p/hr to my amazement, something that I thought only the fridge or kettle could do for me, but neither was on. Some investigative work led me to the immersion heater (no gas water heating) and further playing showed me that the cams were worn on the mechanical timer and the thing was never turning off. One new electronic timer later and my bill dropped by a further £30/month and suddenly I was paying less than my neighbours. They were now borrowing my meter to wonder around their homes discovering savings.

Within less than 2 months the unit paid for itself.

Wattson

Ever on the lookout for new gadgets I discovered Wattson and purchased one of their first devices. This did much the same as my Electrisave, but this time allowed me to capture and graph the data using their rather cumbersome app. Now I had usage graphs and could track trends, associating activities with expense. Now I was really starting to annoy my family.

I played with that for a long time, now further rewiring both my study and TV ‘complex’ to ensure that I could switch as much off as possible ‘at the wall’ when I could, leaving only ‘essential services’ powered on 24/7 (Sky+, Cable Modem, NAS drive etc.)

The only problem with the Wattson was that though it glowed pretty colours, the display would show you your ‘estimated bill for the year’ based on current usage, so the thing fluctuated from £350-£4000 as stuff went on and off, but was to abstracted from reality to be useful to drive behaviour with the family compared to the cost/hour of the previous solution.

I was however generally happy with the Wattson, but felt that I needed more info…

GEO

So, along came an Eco show at the Earl’s Court and the discovery of Green Energy Options and their home monitoring plans. They included not only monitoring to an individual device level, but were also looking at my other big and untrackable expense – gas.

So, I begged to get on their beta trial, even though I was well outside their trial area (East Anglia) and through some stroke of luck I was accepted.

I opted for the top of the line unit, the Trio+ at £250 (discounted for the trial) because that was the one that gave me detailed reporting to a device level and included gas.

So a couple of weeks later 2 chaps showed up in my house, placed clamp ammeters about everywhere possible in my consumer unit (fuse box) and installed individual appliance monitors on everything I thought appropriate in the house (washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher, kettle, TV etc.)

The best piece of it all was that the data was all collected onto an EeePC running MySQL, Apache and their own Flash interface which is beautiful and well thought out. More importantly as it is a webserver I can view my house (and turn things on and off) from ‘anywhere’ after opening port 80 on my router and doing the redirect. Here are some sample screenshots:

The number of screens and ways you can view the data are fantastic.

The gas monitoring I am assured will be coming in the next couple of months, but for now the electricity detail is great. The fact it measures cost over time as opposed to one fixed point means you can learn a LOT:

• I now know my dishwasher costs 16p/cycle, compared to my washing machine at 7p, and that running it on the thermonuclear remove the spot-welded lasagne from the dish mode only takes it to 17p. Best suggestion I have had yet is to get all plastic plates and cutlery and wash them in the washing machine. Instead we don’t put the dishwasher on part-full anymore.
• My kettle was costing us near on 50p/week, whereas my new ‘on demand’ model costs us about 6p/week
• The oven is no longer left on for 30-40 mins to ‘warm up’, neither is the kettle left for 20 mins to ‘warm up’. These things get hot very quickly nowadays.
• Taking into account both the cost of food and energy used in cooking it, the chip shop is wallet friendly in some cases…
• My ‘little 3kW pool heater’ we use in the summer for our 10’ pool costs about £9/day to run – kids now cope with it a little colder than 33C…
• My 40” Sony LCD TV costs hardly anything to run (60-70p/week) – fabulous
• The over 1500W of GU10 spotlights downstairs are killing us, and we are trying to find acceptable either CFL or LED replacements, none found yet but some are on their way to me this week to try.
• Laptop power supplies left plugged in are a BAD thing.
• My wife hates it when I am travelling and phone her up to complain about the amount of TV she has been watching instead of doing the housework…
• My kids know that I can turn their TV off from anywhere in the world…

My next big step? – gas monitoring when they fit it. I will finally be able to answer the question this winter as to whether leaving the heating on all the time on a thermostat or turning it off at night and then reheating the house in the morning is best.

Footnote: What drove me to do all this was not only a fascination with tech, but more importantly a fascination with not wasting money. Not saving the planet – saving cash. In my experience cash beats morality every time…

I’m delighted to announce that theattick.tv are the official Media Partners for HomeCamp and will be streaming the event over on the HomeCamp ustream.tv channel and also streaming into the HomeCamp sim on ReactionGrid.

They will also be interviewing people thoughout the day and putting together video footage from the day for HomeCamp TV.  SO if you are coming to the event, be sure to get yourself on film!

HomeCamp Media partners

I’m delighted to announce that theattick.tv are the official Media Partners for HomeCamp and will be streaming the event over on the HomeCamp ustream.tv channel and also streaming into the HomeCamp sim on ReactionGrid.

They will also be interviewing people thoughout the day and putting together video footage from the day for HomeCamp TV.  SO if you are coming to the event, be sure to get yourself on film!

Following hot on the heels of the first HomeCamp, so HomeCamp 2 happens. For the uninitiated, HomeCamp is the home hacking, automation and green technology community. Think smart meters, monitoring and graphing energy usage.

HomeCamp 2 is on Saturday 25th April 2009, 10am until 6pm at Bash Creations, 65-71 Scrutton Street, London, EC2A 4PJ.  A map of the venue is here.

HomeCamp 2 aims to build on the success of the first event, with an OpenSim event running alongside for virtual participation and to demo the RealWorld and VirtualWorld modelling and automation that the community has been doing.

I’d like to say a big thank you to our sponsors, CurrentCost, Greenmonk, Pachube, ReactionGrid and Onzo, as without them this event would not be happening.

theattick.tv are the official Media Partners for HomeCamp and will be streaming the event over on the HomeCamp ustream.tv channel and also streaming into the HomeCamp sim on ReactionGrid.  They will also be interviewing people thoughout the day and putting together video footage from the day for HomeCamp TV.  So if you are coming to the event, be sure to get yourself on film!

So far have around 75 people signed up.  If you can’t make it, then you can tune in either on the live video ustream, or sign up on ReactionGrid and join us virtually on OpenSim.

More details and videos on the blog http://homecamp.org.uk

For the wiki, which includes signup and is the main portal to all the online activity: http://homecamp.pbwiki.com/

Live video stream on the day of the event and recordings from the first HomeCamp: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/homecamp

1.  We currently have script limitations that everyone needs to respect
2.  We have ideas to overcome the script limitations. Fingers crossed on Plan A!
3.  A freemium idea – office and house rental is free, script usage is a small monthly subscription.
4.  Sponsorship opportunities
5.  Land building ideas and general build styles
6.  Regular events and training + publicity

We have had great community action going on at the HomeCamp sim and I am looking forward to the future with this one.  We have rented a full row of offices now.

Welcoming new tennants Craig Cmehil and Tish Shute.

I’m thinking we have a meeting on Thursday 26th March.  Seems a week away, but we all seem to be busy   Please let me know your thoughts and ideas regarding this on the google group discussion and whether you will be coming along.

The land grab begins

HomeCamp
HomeCamp Labs
HomeCamp Sandbox
HomeCamp Sandbox2

From the meeting we had last Thursday night, we are aiming to have a virtual space to allow us to grow the Home Camp community, to integrate Virtual Worlds with Real World and a great place to run events and sessions.    I’m not entirely sure how we’ll set these up and I am sure we will rename some of the sims.

Stay tuned for the Virtual HomeCamp events calendar, as we are planning on having a regular weekly meeting, certainly initially, and some training sessions to help people get up and running quickly on OpenSim.

A photo taken at the first Virtual HomeCamp meeting on the HomeCamp sim.

We currently have 13 offices on the HomeCamp sim.  One of those is the HomeCamp main office and another has already been rented out to Mike TheBee.  So feel free to come and grab yourself an office.  There is no charge.  Any office with a “Vacant. Enquire within” sign, just stake your claim on the office space.  You might also want to ping either me or Tish Shute so we know it is your office.

Grab any office with a “Vacant. Enquire within” sign on the front.  You’re also welcome to have a house and Dave Pentecost has already got a house rigged up with a live feed from Pachube, which is available to copy and use.

I’m on a building extravaganza at the moment, putting together the buildings and the real estate on the sims.  As soon as the first batch of offices are taken up, I’ll create some more and we’ll keep filling up.

HomeCamp Labs is  potentially the sim that we should use to run any experimental scripts.  So we might want to think about limiting live data feeds and pachube feeds to the Labs sim.  We are planning to have an auditorium for presentations and conference events and there will also be an expo area where green tech companies can have a booth.  So get in touch if you want to have a booth in the Virtual HomeCamp expo.

The HomeCamp Sandbox sim is the place to go and do whatever you want.  Try stuff and build.  Just be kind to the environment and bear in mind that anything in the Sandbox area is likely to be deleted at any point.  So do not leave important stuff in there, or let us know about it.

Overall, really excited by the strong turnout of people at the first Virtual HomeCamp meeting.  Keep an eye on the wiki for the next one.  There are also instructions on the wiki to get you up and running on OpenSim and ReactionGrid.

ReactionGrid is already doing some great work with modelling using Pachube inputs from real life objects and we hope to have some demo environments setup for the event.  As always, watch this space for more details, or drop by HomeCamp on the SIM.

If you are interested in getting involved on the HomeCamp Sim, then let us know in the Google Group discussion.  You can also take a look at the Virtual HomeCamp wiki page for more details.

65-71 Scrutton Street, London, EC2A 4PJ.

A map of the venue is here.

We are planning to have two tracks at this Home Camp.  One track will be hands on hacking and the other track will be more presentation based.  We feel both tracks have valid appeal, but would like to hear your comments on this.

We are also hoping to have Home Camp running on OpenSim so you can attend the event virtually if you are unable to make it.

Stay tuned as we release more details and if you haven’t signed up for Home Camp 2, head over to the wiki and signup.

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.?

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.

Thanks very much for your time, Chris!

Find Dale’s Current Cost GUI app on Google Code.

We cover a lot of subjects in this conversation, including home automation, Current Cost, Google Power Meter, Pachube, Nokia Home Control Center, arduino, Home Easy to name a few.

Take a look at the wiki for details of the next Home Camp in April.

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.

We are yet to confirm the exact date and venue.  However, head over to the wiki and sign-up and suggest session topics.

http://homecamp.pbwiki.com/

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.

If you can’t come along in person, we’re hoping to stream as much as we can over at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/homecamp.

Home Camp is supported by Current Cost, who is sponsoring lunch, tea and coffee and furnishing each attendee with a new model CC128 Current Cost meter when they become available in December. Unfortunately, we will not be walking away with these new meters in our hand on the day, but we will all receive the new Current Cost meter when they become available in December.

Home Camp is supported by Green Monk, who is sponsoring drinks for Home Camp

A special thanks to the following people for their continued help and support in organising Home Camp:

Andy Stanford-Clark
Mark Charmer
James Governor
Janice McGinn
Alexis Biller

Finally a huge thanks for everyone at IBM and twitter followers for the retweeting, blogging and generally pimping links about Home Camp.

http://homecamp.pbwiki.com/

The event is limited to 50 places with 49 people having signed up.  If we go over the 50, then continue to put your name down in case we have any last minute drop outs etc.

Current Cost are giving each attendee to Home Camp a shiny new Current Cost monitor. We’ll be one of the first to get our hands on these.

Do remember to suggest your session topic over on the google discussion. We are also using this area to share code. Ruby code was added this week. Depending how many session topics are suggested, will depend how we run the day. So feel free to suggest ideas.

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/homecamp?hl=en

Look forward to seeing you all there next week and if you can’t make it, we’ll have some live streams.

http://twitpic.com/mv3k

Home Camp is an unconference and so the content is very much driven by everyone attending. If you are coming along and would like to present a topic, then please join the discussion and suggest ideas.

We would like to see as many people as possible get involved with presenting content on the day, although this is not a requirement.

So we have setup a discussion over on the Home Camp Google Group. Head over and join the discussion.

Expect to see sessions on:

Using a current cost meter to monitor electricity
Using Really Small Message Broker for home automation
Making your house tweet
Saving energy with low power servers and devices like a Linksys SLUG or Viglen.
Monitoring water supply
Monitoring gas usage

The exact venue is still to be confirmed, but will be in London on 29th November 2008.

I have been working on this idea for a few weeks now, and mostly wrestling with which name to use for the event.  So I decided on Home Camp.

Funnily enough, we were using the #homecamp hashtag on twitter to tweet about being at home on a weekend and what we were doing. Although this doesn’t seem to have been picked up on the old summize service and hashtags.org has been long gone.

But I thought the name kinda fit.  Especially because Home Camp is more that just Current Cost meters. This is about low energy devices and servers, reducing your electricity bills, monitoring your mouse traps, home automation, monitoring your water usage, using solar polar.  This is a hack day.

There is some great work being done, particulary with Current Cost meters, and Home Camp aims to build on the momentum of this work and help establish a community to continue to exchange new ideas, hacks and scripts.

So who’s involved with Home Camp?

I am organising Home Camp with Dale Lane, who works for IBM and James Governor has pledged GreenMonk sponsorship.  I have also bounced this idea off numerous people that I hope will also become officially involved.

So if you want to come along, then head over to the wiki and add your name to the list.