Home Camp is Live and Monitoring

After a few hectic weeks in the planning, I’m pleased to say that Home Camp happens today. I’m looking forward to this event. Ever since I started to think about Home Camp, it has been fun watching the event progress.

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 Supporters

I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone for supporting Home Camp.  There has been much behind the scenes work done by a huge amount of people, many of which will not be attending.  It truly has been a joy working with you all while putting together Home Camp.

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.

Home Camp Update

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up about Home Camp which is shaping up to be a great event. There are only a couple of places left now, so if you haven’t put your name down on the wiki, then head over and sign up.

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

Request for session topics

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

Home Camp on Upcoming and Facebook

We’re setting up Home Camp on all the usual networks.  Watch this blog for announcements as we release details.  You can find Home Camp over on Upcoming and Facebook.  So if you are coming along, please add yourselves to the list if you use those services.

Announcing Home Camp

Home Camp is an unconference about using technology to monitor and automate the home for greener resource use and to save costs.

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.