Back in the spring I did some work on extracting and reporting on the current “PEI Energy Interchange” figure: the amount of electricity that Prince Edward Island is pulling from (or pushing to) the mainland. When my Nabaztag rabbit sprang to life on Christmas Eve after a year of dormancy I reasoned that it was time to get the rabbit involved in the project. The result:

The code that does this is here and the process is simple:

1. Pull the previously-scraped-and-XMLified energy interchange data.
2. Use Swift to turn the PEI figure into a WAV file with a message message P E I energy interchange is XX megawatts.
3. Use the Nabaztag API (with the API key from nabaztag.com) to have my rabbit read the WAV file.

I’ve got this set up to read the figure to me every hour here in the office and after two days I’m finding it (a) not annoying and (b) a helpful way of building up peripheral awareness of PEI’s energy usage (like, hey, what’s happening today: we’re pulling almost 190MW from the mainland! We max out at about 210MW).