Joking aside, I thought it might be beneficial to start thinking about what I want to do with the data I will collect, and, crucially, how I’m going to collect it.
Locating the CurrentCost on my network
I plan to connect my CurrentCost to my Windows Home Server. To do this, I have purchased the CurrentCost data cable direct from CurrentCost. This came with a serial connection, which the Home Server does not have. I also purchased a Serial-USB adapter from eBay for about £3.00 (let’s hope it works).
Hopefully that takes care of the connection to the server, so now I just need to start thinking about how to extract that data from the unit and store it.
I have decided to write a small, low-footprint Windows Service that will receive the data from the CurrentCost and post it via a web service to my web server. Following this, I will need a simple web service on my web server to a) authenticate the  Windows Service and b) insert the received data into a database.
I will then write a very simple web site, initially, to provide access to the data collected from the CurrentCost and offer to graph it in some way or another.
That should take care of the ground work, then it’s just a case of using my imagination to do some other cool stuff. Not sure how that will go 🙂
Hopefully the unit will arrive next week sometime and I can make a start on all this.
Watch this space for more updates.
Richard Parker 