Open Serendipity

I interviewed with a small energy consulting firm last week that I would love to work for, but whether or not they decide to hire me, just interviewing with them inspired me to set aside my education efforts for a bit and really focus on trying to get a green tech job.

One of my strategies for making that happen is to find an interesting open source project related to energy, join the community, and start making contributions (code, tests, docs, whatever I can contribute that would be useful) in hopes that I can develop enough expertise to get some paying corporation interested in the same, or similar, technology to hire me to do work on their behalf in the community.

Here are the open source and open standards projects related to energy that I’ve found so far.

Open Source

Open Micro Smart Grid (OMSG) – Very cool project but more like research in the open than a community of developers, and it is just starting.  But the Project Proposal has a lot of useful information and pointers in it to related work elsewhere.

OpenLynx – No code yet, but a this earth2tech article says:  “…the OpenLynx project, started by Anno Scholten, vice president of business development for NovusEdge, is looking to tackle the underlying software that controls the energy consumption of massive commercial buildings.”  The article helpfully adds: “On June 22, OpenLynx plans to launch the next version of the source code.”  So I’m watching this one.

ACme: Berkeley Wireless AC Meter/Switch – Another cool research project, but not one I’m likely to be able to contribute to, I don’t think.  But I would like to use it!  So maybe I could give good user feedback, if it is ever available.  Note the link on the page to LoCal (right) which is certainly worth reading.

Tweet-a-Watt – This is similar, at least superficially so, but it is more of a Maker project that you can build.  If I can get my family interested (I don’t really want to solder, but I bet my kids would love to learn from my husband) this could be a fun project.  (They had fun at Maker Faire recently.)  I would like to play with the software collects and displays the energy usage data.  Maybe I could add code to store the data in amee.

ONE-NET – This project is about an open standard but it is also open source and has some actual code to it.  It started out as one thing but seems to be evolving into another, a standard for Home Area Networks, meaning the fabled internet of things, things that know about energy and communicate with smart meters about pricing info and decide when and how to operate.

open-ZB – This one is quite interesting because there is no doubt that ZigBee is already a standard, but not really open outside of the ZigBee Alliance, as far as I can tell.  Yet this is an OpenSource Toolset for IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee.

Freaklabs Open Source ZigBee Blog – I have not completely grok’d what the heck this is, but I think if I read it all, I will achieve enlightenment.  More importantly, it appears to be written from the point of view of the open source community, so in language that I understand.

openAMR – This is real, but appears to be a develop-in-the-open project more than a community project, so far.  AMR is Automatic Meter Reading, a subset of the broader (or perhaps newer?) term AMI, which is Advanced Metering Infrastructure.

Open Standards

It is not easy to jump right in to an Open Standards effort and make any sort of useful contribution, but they are a great source of technical information that is good for an unemployed person like me to study, since I want to work in green tech.

OpenADR or Open Auto-DR – And DR is Demand Response.  One of the three speakers at the Women Energy Associates meeting I attended in May was from LBNL and spoke about this project and their related standards efforts.  I first learned about DR when I did some volunteer event management prep work for the SVLG when they were producing a local DR conference.

IEEE Smart Grid Interop Standards Project P2030 – Is this the emerging open (?) standard for the smart grid?

OASIS Blue Initiative – or is this emerging open standard for the smart grid?  I will have to consult my friend the standards guy.

OpenSG – or maybe this one?  “The IEC takes charge of setting global standards for Smart Grid.” (May 2009)

So that is what I’ve found so far.  Much to study, and a few projects that I should investigate or watch.

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Tech by marla