Warm windy days are my friend

I’m on the Agile Octopus electricity tariff, which means that the price of my electricity changes every half hour depending on the cost of electricity generation. The cost is predicted each day and so I can plan when to do things like charge up the car, bake a cake or smelt some aluminium.

I love it when the weather is warm and windy. This means that demand is low and the wind generators are busy. For the last few days the cost of power has been very low (everyone being on holiday probably helps too), with more than a few occasions when the price went negative and I was being paid to consume electricity. I didn’t actually get up at three am to get paid to charge the car, but I was very tempted.

Agile Octopus Tariff Display in HackSpace magazine

I get my copies of the magazine from Readly

If you’re wondering what that distant rumbling noise is, it might be crowds of people rushing to the newsagents to buy their copy of HackSpace magazine so that they can read my article in it.

Or it might be a bus going past.

Anyhoo, the article is out there. You can find the project on GitHub here.

Agile Octopus Display Lives

Not used Silk filament before. I rather like it

Did the final design of the Agile Octopus Tarff Display case today and printed it out. It looks quite good. Even in pink.

Device Configuration using Web Pages

You need to use Edge or Chrome

I’ve had a lot of fun making the Agile Octopus Tariff display. It works a treat. The device is powered by a Raspberry Pi PICO-W which connects to your Wi-Fi and grabs the tariff information from the Octopus server. However, the display needs to be configured with Wi-Fi settings and the web address of the tariff information. You can do this by editing the MicroPython code in the device, but I wanted something easier. I wanted you to be able to take a display and configure it anywhere. So I’ve built a web page which connects your browser to the device over a serial connection. The display sends a little chunk of JSON to the webpage which builds a web page which will accept the configuration data. You make your changes, hit “Submit” and the values are all sent back to the display.

You can find the page here. The GitHub page with the source code for the project is here.

Playing with e-ink

This is a very good price for electricity..

I’m making a little device that shows the prices of the Agile Octopus Tariff. I’ve got it working on an LCD panel and today I thought I’d get it going on an e-ink device. The one I’m using is made by Pimoroni. You plug your PICO or PICO-W into the back, load up their code and off it goes. I’m really impressed by the quality of the display, although it can take quite a while to update.

The display above shows the current price per kilowatt/hour and a little histogram showing how the price will change for the remainder of the day. It turns out that the important thing with e-ink displays is to minimise the number of redraws that you do. I’ve made a little set of display items which manage their particular elements and only redraw when their contents change. All the code will be upon GitHub once I’ve made it work.

Agile Octopus Histograms

This is a very nice lcd panel

I spent some time today working on my Agile Octopus price display. Agile Octopus is an electricity tariff where you get a different price every half-hour during the day. A while back I made a device that would get the current price and display it, but now I’ve added a little histogram that displays upcoming prices for the rest of the day. The picture above was taken at 7:14 pm. The solid lines in the histogram are the hours and the dotted lines the half hour prices. On the right you can see the minimum and maximum prices. It looks like the prices will be going down over the evening. We’ve found this quite useful when deciding when to put the washing on or bake a cake. The display is powered by a Raspberry Pi PICO-W driving a rather nice LCD panel from Pimoroni.

It’s actually rather pleasing to make something that folks actually find useful and might even save us money.

Octopus Agile Tarif Display

The display looks really nice

I’m building a little device to make it easier to use Agile Octopus. It’s a Raspberry Pi PICO W with a really nice LCD panel from Pimoroni. Today I got the Pico connecting to the WiFi and pulling down the tariffs from Octopus. Next I have to do some data display stuff.

Agile Octopus for tariff fun and games

I think we’ll have salad for tea

I’ve just added another monkey to my back. I’ve signed up for Agile Octopus. This is an energy pricing scheme that uses green energy which can change in price depending on the weather. I now really like the idea of strong winds...

The tariffs are set on a half hourly basis and you get them the day before. I’m keen to have a go with it because it would be nice to get paid for charging the car (if there is a lot more power than demand you can actually get prices to go negative). If I had a battery in the house and/or solar power it would be even more interesting.

We’ve been on it for a couple of days and it is quite fun. I’m not sure if we’ll be on it for ever, we’ll have to see what effect it has on the bills.