Tyler Kieft

The Watt Watcher was the capstone project for my Electrical Engineering degree at the University of Rochester. The concept was similar to the Kill-A-Watt, a personal energy meter for any A/C powered electronic device. But instead of just measuring instantaneous power consumption, our device tracked power usage history, and could graph it over a period of an hour, a day, or a month. We hoped that showing people their wasteful habits visually, it would encourage them to save energy.

My contribution to this project was mostly software. I wrote a few thousand lines of code which encompassed the user interface, the data collection and graphing code, and of course the interface with the LCD display, the SD card data storage, the real-time clock chip, and the user-input buttons.