Dr. Wattson Energy Monitoring Board

Given environmental and budget concerns, we’d all like to use less power. Turning off lights and other devices when not in use is a good first start, but by itself, this doesn’t give you any detailed feedback as to what kind of effect you’re having on your power consumption. While products to help with this are available, if you’d like to design your own custom solution, hacker Sridhar Rajagopal’s Dr. Wattson aims to make this process much easier.

The breakout board is equipped with a Microchip MCP39F521 chip to measure the power used on a single outlet. It features an Arduino library to facilitate use with this and similar dev boards, meaning your custom monitoring or even control solution is only a few steps away.

The board is designed to be tolerant of a wide range of voltages, which means that it can also be used with Raspberry Pi or any other 3.3v MCUs without any modifications.

Check out Dr. Wattson’s page for more details, and to sign up to be notified when the board is released.