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- Smart plugs are internet-enabled wall plugs that you can connect your appliances to and access capability to remotely turn an appliance on or off, and log consumption data.
- Our team used a white-label smart plug to investigate how to integrate with these devices and consume the data.
- Using Tuya and Flutter we built a basic prototype app that displays consumption data for appliances in our office.
Some Ideas Factory initiatives start with a broad opportunity or problem statement and then ideation. For others, we go technology first, and let the devs explore a piece of technology to understand what we can do with it and ideate from there. Smart plugs was a technology first #ideasfest.
What is a smart plug?
Smart plugs are an unassuming piece of technology that looks just like a normal plug that you use in a normal wall socket. Once in the wall, you plug a standard appliance into it.
Smart plugs have a lot under the hood including internet connectivity that enables you to remotely turn an appliance on and off, and to measure its power consumption. There are a few commercial brands that provide a companion app with services already built in, but we wanted to fiddle with it and see how we could directly tap into those functions ourselves. So we bought a few not-so-fancy smart plugs, and started poking around under the hood.
What did we explore?
Fanchao was the lucky developer who got this #ideasfest. He took the challenge in his stride, and jumped through the technical hoops to get into the brains of the Smart Plug (and access its APIs). Once there, he got working on integrating them with Tuya, one of the largest Internet-of-Things (IoT) platforms in the world. Tuya has a few data mining and analysis functions built in, and also provides a wide range of SDKs that can be used to send and retrieve information associated with connected devices.
We hooked up the plugs to a few appliances in our office, including the fridge, toaster and dishwasher, and let the consumption data flow in. While that was happening, Fanchao created an app using Flutter to display the data in real time. With that, we watched as the toaster spiked its consumption during morning breakfasts, and the dishwasher ramped up at the end of the day. This whole prototype took about four days to get going. No designers were harmed (or involved) in this PoC.
The conclusion
The functions of the plug itself are pretty simple (turn on/off, read consumption data), but this process allowed us to explore a few ideas using the data we capture.
Data can be used to enhance user experiences for energy companies, and give more insight into spending habits. This can help both energy retailers and users to gain insight into the impact of appliance usage, and understand which appliances or house areas could be better managed to help customers save energy.
Other ideas to pursue include using machine learning algorithms to tell users the best time of the day to do certain tasks (like the washing); or detecting when an appliance is not being used and turn it off at the wall. That could help with saving some dollars in the power bill too.