There are twittering celebs (hello Ashton!), twittering athletes (get well soon Lance) and even a twittering toaster.
For greener gadget enthusiasts there’s the new Tweet-a-watt kit from Adafruit Industries that lets users post the daily energy consumption of their refrigerator or TV set to a Twitter account. The idea won the Greener Gadgets Competition earlier this month and now the kits are on sale.
"We feel there is a
social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH (kilowatts per hour)," says Adafruit on its blog. "By
sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter users can compete for
the lowest numbers and also see how they’re doing compared to their
friends and followers."
Tweet-a-watt is an open source hardware project that builds on an off-the-shelf power monitor called Kill-a-Watt. Kill-a-Watt is a power meter with a large LCD display that connect to appliances. When connected, the device assesses how efficient they are and display consumption by the kilowatt-hour.
Tweet-a-Watt takes that gadget to the next level. With help from Xbee, open source networking receiver and transmitter modules that comes as part of the kit, users can transmit power usage information to a computer receiver. The receiver can log, graph and even tweet that information.
Each kit costs $90.
Photo: Tweet-a-Watt/Adafruit Industries
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