How we envisage emonTx being used
Many if you might be thinking what is our motivation behind the developments at OpenEnergyMonitor and how we see our designs being used.
Firstly we believe open-source is a better way of doing things, it is a way in which people can get involved in developing and making technology and build on the work of others. The OpenEnergyMonitor hardware builds upon the Arduino open-source micro-controller platform.
Taking the recently released emonTx as an example; we see the design being used in two ways:
- For the enthusiast/hobbyist/maker/
student: to be able to easily build an open-source monitoring system. They will assemble it themselves and customise it for their needs and hopefully develop some cool applications. To help them get going we will provide good documentation and code examples. Think along the lines of Arduino, Adafruit and JeeLabs. We hope that user developments will feed back to OpenEnergyMonitor. We are considering setting up an OpenEnergyMonitor online shop to sell the PCBs and kits. We have created a feedback form to try and gauge interest from the community.
- For commercial use: The emonTx could be used in a professional large scale energy monitoring systems. Trystan Lea (founder of openenergymonitor) and I are in the process of setting up a business to offer energy monitoring services to organisations and businesses in our local area (see megni.co.uk) We are currently working on a community energy project which will also be a pilot test for our monitoring system see: http://ecobro.org/node/24
. We are happy for and very much encourage other people to use our designs in a commercial setting as long as they attribute OpenEnergyMonitor and make any resulting designs available under the same open-source license; thus allowing others and us to benefit.
The same reasoning also applies to all other content on this site.
To read more about open-source at OpenEnergyMonitor please click here.
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| A prototype OpenEnergyMonitor monitoring system (emonTx + NanodeRF) being exhibited at a recent sustainability event |