After experimenting with the Grid Insight AMRUSB-1 utility meter receiver on my Mac yesterday, I moved on to plugging the device into a Raspberry Pi, which is one of the platforms I hope to have in place in households as part of the Social Consumption Project.

When I plug the Grid Insight AMRUSB-1 into a Raspberry Pi, here’s the output from dmesg:

[   83.328267] usb 1-1.3: new full-speed USB device number 5 using dwc_otg
[   83.441385] usb 1-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=04d8, idProduct=faed
[   83.441422] usb 1-1.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[   83.441439] usb 1-1.3: Product: Utility Meter Receiver
[   83.441453] usb 1-1.3: Manufacturer: Grid Insight
[   83.514658] cdc_acm 1-1.3:1.0: This device cannot do calls on its own. It is not a modem.
[   83.515430] cdc_acm 1-1.3:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
[   83.534250] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
[   83.534326] cdc_acm: USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters

This tells me, among other things, that the device gets attached to /dev/ttyACM0.

Based on this, I modified the Python script I wrote while first experimenting with the device on my Mac, and create a full-fledged daemon for the Raspberry Pi that will launch on boot and will log data to Amazon AWS Dynamo DB (which I chose simply because it was dead-simple to get setup and to push data to from Python).

I’ve got the Raspberry Pi running here in the office, logging data to Dynamo DB from a variety of electric and water meters in the area:

My favourite place to eat in the summer is in the back garden at Tai Chi Gardens: it signals the start of summer when it becomes warm enough for Kenny and Winnie to put out the tables in the back. But sometimes it’s nice to sit in the front yard, especially now that they’ve renovated a little and installed new tables and chairs. Today was one of those days. With Ethan sprawled in the shade at my feet I enjoyed a Bamboo Rice and Vegetables on a late summer afternoon.

Summer is over and I’m jumping into the Social Consumption Project’s implementation.

My original plan was to acquire 6 of the Digi ERT/Ethernet Gateways, a black box that purport to be able to read the ERT radio signals from water and electricity meters and upload them, via Ethernet, to a central server.

Earlier this week, though, I placed my order for these, only to get a phone call back later the same day from a friendly representative at Digi letting me know (a) these are offered on a “build to order” basis with a lead time of 30 days and (b) it’s an “end of life” product, with no announced replacement. I cancelled my order: I wasn’t eager to invest time and effort in getting a product that I won’t be able to roll out more widely, especially one that might require server-side magic from Digi to continue to operate.

And so I went looking for an alternative.

Which led me to Grid Insight, a small California company that seems heaven-sent for my purposes:

Through focused research and engineering, Grid Insight works with utilities, technology companies, and citizens to use utility grid technologies for public benefit.

Exactly.

I called up Greg Hancock, personable owner of the company, and we had an illuminating chat, the end of which is that Greg put me together with someone who, unbeknowst to me, has an office two blocks away from mine here in Charlottetown, Keir Pollard at SpryPoint. Not only is Keir deeply steeped in the terrain I’m hoping to cover, but he also happened to have a Grid Insight AMRUSB-1 that he has generously loaned me to test.

Which is what I’ve just done. Man, was that easy! What you see in the photo is the unit plugged into my USB hub.

Once I plugged it in, it showed up as a USB serial device on my attached Mac as tty.usbmodemfa1311

# ls /dev/tty.*
/dev/tty.Bluetooth-Incoming-Port    /dev/tty.Bluetooth-Modem        /dev/tty.usbmodemfa1311

Reading the output from the device was as simple as:

# screen /dev/tty.usbmodemfa1311

At which point I started to see SCM messages from nearby meters:

$UMSCM,26080513,8,20153*6F
$UMSCM,26692740,13,25950*5A
$UMSCM,17845789,7,1232689*62
$UMSCM,26080513,8,20153*6F
$UMSCM,26080514,8,31849*6A
$UMSCM,26080515,8,31890*6F
$UMSCM,17845789,7,1232708*6A
$UMSCM,24545149,7,1332217*67
$UMSCM,26080515,8,31890*6F
$UMSCM,26080514,8,31849*6A
$UMSCM,26080513,8,20153*6F
$UMSCM,26080514,8,31849*6A
$UMSCM,24543136,7,1762053*6A
$UMSCM,21294573,7,540347*52
$UMSCM,26080513,8,20153*6F
$UMSCM,26771974,13,88729*58
$UMSCM,26080513,8,20153*6F

Parsing this apart using the Grid Insight reference as a guide, I learned that these are standard NMEA 0183 sentences:

• the lines start with $.
• the next five characters, UMSCM, are the “talker.”
• the remainder of the line consists of comma-delimited data.
• the lines end with an asterisk (*) followed by a checksum.

Looking at the data fields:

• the first number, 26080513 in the first line above, is the unique ERT serial number of a meter.
• the second number, 8 in the first line above, indicates which type of meter (water, gas, electricity) this is.
• the third number,  20153 in the first line above, is the “consumption register” – the current reading of the meter in whatever units it uses.

I compared this handy Grid Insight graphic to the electricity meter in the basement of The Guild:

and found that its ERT serial number is 31884386 and its meter type is 8; this meter doesn’t appear in the list that the AMRUSB-1 detected, but that’s not surprising as the meter is at the very far end of the building from us, three floors below.

So the list above is of closer, neighbouring meters (one of the interesting and generally not-well-known aspects of electricity and water meters is that the data from them is broadcast in the clear, so anyone suitably equipped with a radio to read and parse the data can read any electricity or water meter they’re close enough to).

The meter type values my borrowed AMRUSB-1 are picking up are:

• 7 - unknown
• 8 - Maritime Electric (I know this because of the 8 on the photo above).
• 13 - I’m guessing this is Charlottetown Water & Sewer, from the label of my home water meter.
• 23 - unknown
• 24 - unknown

In the 15 minutes I ran the data collection, the unit picked up reports from 10 unique meters.

This is all very promising, and I’m thinking that I’ll be able to pair the AMRUSB-1 and something like a wifi-equipped Raspberry Pi to power my test households for the Social Consumption Project.

The openness of ERT data, of course, raises some interesting ethical issues: in theory I could, by making a regular daily drive around downtown Charlottetown, collection electricity and water consumption information for thousands of households and businesses. The data would be anonymous, in the sense that it would be tied only to an ERT serial number, and not to a customer name or address, but it remains possible to conceive of collecting this data en masse as being untoward. The Grid Insight take on this issue, on their FAQ page, is this:

We are not lawyers and can provide no authoritative guidance as to the legality of receiving wireless metering data, whether from your own home or from someone else’s. We can only say that we are not aware of any law that prohibits it. Common decency, on the other hand, would dictate that you think of looking at someone else’s meter data just as you would think of looking into their home through their bathroom windows – it’s rude and socially unacceptable. Legislation relating to ownership of a customer’s utility consumption data is beginning to appear in some states, notably Illinois, California, and Texas. Please do your own research and contribute to the ongoing public debate on this topic.

This is a set of ethical questions that is only going to leap further into the fore as the barriers to being able to read this data are lowered, both cost-wise and in terms of the technical expertise required.

Update: I wrote a tiny Python script to log data from the AMRUSB-1; I’ll leave it running over the weekend and see what happens.

Update: I left the AMRUSB-1 logging date in my house for nine hours last night, using the Python script I wrote to log data to the house iMac. A total of 5,590 readings were logged; of these, there were 171 unique readings from 17 different meters (the readings “bubble up” from meters even if there’s been no change in the data). My house electricity meter’s initial reading was 43,780; nine hours later it was 43,786, meaning we used 6 kWh overnight (about 78 cents worth of electricity). The house’s water meter initially read 1106 and nine hours later the reading was the same, which is good, because as far as I know we didn’t use any water overnight.

Regular readers may recall that I spent a good chunk of my spring working on a commission to create six panels for Brenda Whiteway’s Confederation Country Cabinet. I was happy to receive this photo from Brenda yesterday showing the piece installed in its permanent home in the Coles Building. It’s an amazing collaboration, and Brenda can be proud of her Herculean task of marshalling the collected creative resources that went into it. Next time you’re appearing before a standing committee – or popping into the Provincial Archives – be sure to take a look!

My work-in-progress gets another element: Prince Edward Island itself, which I will print in red.

Oliver headed off to grade 8 at Birchwood this morning; Ethan’s not ready to stay in school with him during the day, but he walks to school with us every morning. Off they go! (My archive isn’t complete, but recent years are there; and the first one).

Grade Eight, 2014

Grade Seven, 2013

Grade Six, 2012

Grade Five, 2011

Grade One, 2007

I’ve been turning this idea over in my head all summer long while the maelstrom of Confederation boosterism plays out on every street corner. Someone, I rationed, needs to memorialize the anti-confederates. It’s not a finished concept yet; just a work in progress.

We stopped for coffee at Second Cup in Saint John yesterday. They were promoting their new flat white heavily in the shop, both on the menu, on posters and with a glossy brochure. The brochure goes into some detail to explain what a flat white is, and includes this introductory infographic:

Then, down below, it compares other more-well-known coffees using the same colour scheme:

It’s a good idea, but one that, alas, falls flat because of the decision to use awkward lines to label the flat white’s components, presumably because someone decided that “double shot of espresso forte” had to appear first on the list.

These lines make it much more difficult to parse the infographic and to deduce, at a glance, which colours map to which components. Which, in turn, makes it more difficult to compare the components in the flat white to those in the other coffees.

What could have been an excellent, helpful graphic ends up as something that hurts my head every time I look at it.

Eighteen years ago I headed down to Dublin, New Hampshire for the first time to visit my new colleagues at Yankee Publishing. I made a brief pit-stop at the tourist information centre in St. Stephen, New Brunswick and on the bookshelf there I happened to spy a book about Campobello Island by one Steve Muskie, a book that was notable not for its subject but for its author: Steve was the man at Yankee who’d recruited me, and it was Steve that I was on my way to visit for the first time. Thanks to the book, and its author photo, I now knew what Steve looked like.

Despite my interest being in Steve and not Campobello, in the years since I always had it in the back of my mind that I’d like to visit the island: I’m a sucker for enclaves and so that fact that road access to the island, which is Canadian, requires driving from the U.S. appealed to me. I was also intrigued by the notion that the Roosevelt Campobello International Park was a bi-national project. And I like islands.

And so when it came time to chart our course back from Bethel, Maine to Prince Edward Island, I realized I had my chance, finally: we could drive onto Campobello from Maine, take a ferry to Deer Island, New Brunswick, then another ferry from Deer Island to the New Brunswick mainland, and then reconnect with the highway to PEI.

Which is exactly what we did.

I booked us a last-minute room at the Friars Bay Motel and off we headed on Saturday morning, across the middle of Maine toward the easternmost part of the country.

The drive, along Rte. 219, up the I-95 a little, the along Rte. 1 along the Maine coast, was occasionally very scenic, occasionally very crowded (especially around the turn-off to Bar Harbor, where all New Englanders apparently decided to spend the long weekend), and almost completely lacking in quality coffee.

We arrive on Campobello around 4:00 p.m. after an easy border-crossing with no line-up at all. We checked in at the Friars Bay Motel only to find that a confusion, related to multiple people named “Peter” booking at the last minute, had resulted in a double-booking for our room in the motel. The staff, however, didn’t drop a beat: they had arranged for us to stay in an oceanside house in Welshpool, just up the road, for the same price. Who were we to complain.

The house was a little musty, but it had three bedrooms, a complete kitchen, a huge living room and dining room, a nice sun porch, a deck, a yard for Ethan to romp around in, and a view to end all views:

We settled in, and then decamped to the Fireside Restaurant, inside the park, for a pleasant supper; on the way back we saw the sun set over America from the beach at Friars Bay:

On Sunday morning we got up early, had a quick breakfast from supplies gathered the night before from the coop grocery store up the road, and then headed to the park for a tour.

My Roosevelt knowledge to this point was weak: I knew about the New Deal, and the war, and about Eleanor as a pioneering feminist, but little else. The visitors centre in the park, along with a tour of Roosevelt Cottage, did an excellent job of bringing us up to speed: the cottage is well-preserved and provides a fascinating look at how the rich summered on the shore, and the staff providing the guided tour were helpful and answered all of our questions.

The highlight of our visit was the Tea with Eleanor program, a free lecture-with-cookies-and-tea, held in the stunning Hubbard Cottage. It lasted about an hour, and consisted of a bottomless cup of King Cole tea, ginger and lemon cookies, and an exploration of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt. The guides told a good story, the tea was strong, and the surroundings perfect.

After tea, we headed back to Welshpool where we caught the 1:00 p.m. ferry to Deer Island ($28 for car and passengers, runs until mid-September, takes about 30 minutes). The ferry is an ingenious combination of barge and tugboat, connected by a device that allows the tug to swing around and change directions. The route affords views of Lubec (in the distance), Eastport and the islands of the area.

Deer Island is nothing to write home about in terms of facilities, but the coastal scenery along the winding 30 minute drive is stunning.

We caught the 2:00 p.m. ferry from Deer Island to the mainland (free, takes 20 minutes), which offers similarly interesting views (although depending on your position on the ferry these can be well-obscured).

These two ferries are two-thirds of the so-called “Quoddy Loop”: we could have doubled back into the USA via the Deer Island to Eastport, Maine ferry (operated by the same company) to “close the loop,” and, indeed, Eastport looks like an intriguing place to visit, in part because of the Tides Institute, so perhaps on our next trip that’s exactly what we’ll do.

Once we hit the mainland we made a beeline from home, stopping briefly in Saint John for coffee (everything was closed except for Second Cup, which turns out to offer an excellent flat white, so we were not disappointed), and in Moncton for supper at Calactus (which is not a great vegetarian restaurant, but it is a vegetarian restaurant in Moncton, which is enough to make it remarkable).

We rolled our rented Fiat 500L into Charlottetown around 9:30 p.m., quickly unloaded, I ran it back to the airport, took a taxi back home, and was in bed by 11:00 p.m.

And so, 18 years after Campobello first came on my radar, I finally got to experience it. It was well worth it, and I’m certain we’ll be back.

We’ve spent the last week here in Bethel, Maine with the gathered Rukavinas: 14 people and one service dog housed in a palatial mansion that far exceeds our station in life (but which, split 5 ways, is surprisingly affordable).

While the details of the intra-familial hijinks that ensured are locked, of necessity, in a vault of secrecy, I can report the following highlights we came across in Metro Bethel:

DiCocoa’s Market Bakery & Cafe, on Main Street downtown, is the local bohemian, dog-friendly, coffee house, serving espresso, intriguing bagels, a wide range of pastries made in-house and offering an eclectic range of local grocery products (kimchi, yogurt, gelato, coffee beans from Larry’s). We had coffee there every day, often-times twice. It’s got a nice vibe, acceptable coffee, and the food is tasty (especially the intriguing bagels). The highlight of our week at DiCocoa’s came tonight, however: the annex next door is opened on occasion for “dining experiences,” and tonight it was Mexican Night, a meal, served family-style, that blew our minds; everything was fresh-picked, locally-sourced, and lovingly made. If you have an opportunity to take in the next offering, I highly recommend you do.

The Good Food Store, on Route 26 heading toward Sunday River, is a nice little healthy grocery store with an array of dry and fresh goods. They have a large selection of dry goods, bread, wine, some frozen entrees that are good for large-group-feeding, and the largest selection of kombucha I’ve ever seen. I learned a lot about by place by eavesdropping on conversation between the cashier and the personable Tucker Carlson while I was waiting in line. There’s a BBQ trailer next door where Catherine and Oliver indulged in various falls-off-the-bone barbeque delights.

Marta’s Bakery, a 30 minute drive south in Waterford, was an unexpected treat. Marta is a Czech baker who serves a lovely array of pastries, accompanied by the best coffee we’ve had on the trip, from her hillside chalet.

The Local Hub, a 30 minute drive east in Greenwood, was described online as a cross between a European bakery, an organic grocery and a yoga studio, and that’s pretty accurate. We stopped for lunch on Wednesday: the food was tasty and the staff exceedingly friendly. Catherine picked up some very nice wool after lunch from the display at the back. Right across the street was a shop selling guns, ammo, Hello Kitty products and origami supplies (which is how you know you’re in Maine when you’re there).

We’re heading back to PEI in the morning, by way of Campobello Island and the ferry to Deer Island, NB, arriving home, if all goes according to plan, on Sunday. This has been the first vacation I’ve had in years that resembled vacations as they are meant to happen: eating, drinking, swimming, relaxing, enjoying the company of family and not working at all. It was oddly pleasant.