This is a daily weblog about my experiments based on the mix of electronics and computing called “Physical Computing”. I’m building little “sensor nodes” to measure electricity use, temperature, light, etc. which they transmit wirelessly to one of the central computers in the house. One goal is to better understand how we’re using electricity and how we’re heating the home, so that we can try to improve on it. We’ve achieved a roughly 15% reduction in the past few years, simply by paying a bit more attention to everything. There’s still a lot to do, particularly with gas consumption, as our house is fully open and very hard to heat locally.

There is one new post every day at midnight. Day in, day out, except during the summer break. Most posts are categorized – see the links at the bottom of this page. Most posts are also tagged, although I haven’t figured out why both mechanisms exist. I don’t know how to list these tags, so here is a manually compiled list (with counts in parentheses):

Arduino (26), CNC (17), Displays (19), Electronics (23), Energy (1), Graphics (3), Home automation (60), ISP (26), JeeBot (18), JeeHub (21), JeeLink (39), JeeMon (59), JeeNode (312), JeePlug (132), JeeRev (3), JeeSMD (5), LowPower (43), Metering (2), Musings (19), MuxShield (5), Network (36), POF (5), Power (13), Reflow (22), Sensors (94), Techniques (75), X10 (5) – (updated June 2011)

(and here’s an alphabetical and a chronological index of all weblog posts…)

There are three other websites associated with this weblog:

• the Café is a wiki where all documentation and reference material is being collected
• the Forum area is an open discussion forum to ask, discuss, and exchange ideas
• the Shop offers some of my projects, for those interested in kits or ready-made stuff

If you are interested in electronics and/or computing, then maybe some posts on this weblog will encourage you to go out and explore the fascinating world of physical computing. There are over 900 posts. Yes, it’s that much fun!

Explore! Tinker! Create! Learn! Invent! What better way is there to shape our future than to be part of it!

Oh, and enjoy your visit,
-jcw