Periodically clients send me stuff to play with. About a year ago, one sent me this:
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What is it? It is a small computer called Jetson Xavier created by Nvidia corporation primarily designed for controlling industrial robots. Why anybody thought I would be able to add anything to the conversation about it is beyond me since I know absolutely NOTHING about industrial robots. But it is cool as hell! It is an insanely powerful little computer (more powerful than my top of the line MacBook Pro) and since it is designed for industrial robots, its power requirements are EXTREMELY low. When I fire up all of the CPUs and the GPU it only consumes 30 watts and I can pare back the number of CPU cores all the way down to using only 10 watts!
But, like I said initially, I had no idea what I should do with it since I am not into industrial robots. So it has sat in a box on a shelf for the last year. The day before yesterday an idea for it hit me like a sledge hammer and since the weather has been too crappy to be outside doing stuff the last few days, I decided to start my new home automation project!
When we built M.T. Acres all of the appliances, the furnace, hot water heater, well pump, even the garage door opener are all "smart". We did not want "smart" appliances, but getting "dumb" appliances was just not an option for the models Mrs Inor wanted. So we paid for all this crap but never connected it to the internet to be "smart" because we did not want the manufacturers tracking our use patterns for it and even potentially controlling it.
But I got to thinking the Jetson would make a PERFECT "brain" for all of our "smart" appliances! So I got it set up with a Linux operating system and so far have the two freezers, well pump, furnace, hot water heater, kitchen refrigerator, garage door opener and Mrs Inor's weather station talking to it. So far, all I am doing is collecting data from each device on general usage statistics with absolutely NO information going out to the manufacturer.
I am going to let it collect data for a couple months on just normal daily usage and when each device turns on and off and how much power each uses and what time of day the power is used most frequently. After I have 2-3 months worth of data, I will use that to train a statistical model to optimize our electrical use. The Jetson has more than enough power to do deep learning models and reinforcement learning models as well as being able to reconfigure each appliance on the fly as it figures out the best way to minimize our electricity costs.
I am thinking this is going to be a project like my cryptocurrency experiments. It is going to take some time to get the pieces properly in place. But once they are, it should also have some significant payback like the crypto. Conservatively it should be able to reduce our electric bill by at least 10-15% once the model is well trained. It could be even more.
Originally Posted by T-Man 1066
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