Powerhack

I've been thinking about different things you could do with the ESP8266. I've got a few smaller projects lined up but there's one idea I keep coming back to that could actually be really amazing. What I want is an all-in-one power interface. It would be one of those through-plug form factors like most existing wireless switches and power meters, and basically connect your power point to wifi.

You plug it in and set it up (probably using a temporary wireless network or something) and then it connects to your wifi. From there, you can turn the switch on and off, measure its power usage at any point and see graphs over time. The whole thing would be controlled from a web interface running on a machine in your house, which would coordinate every switch on the network. There'd probably be a prebuilt all-in-one control device too, for people who don't want to install anything.

There's all kinds of cool stuff you could do with that. Off the top of my head, turn your lights on and off from your computer or phone, measure power-hungry appliances over time, figure out if you left the heater on at home and switch it off. It'd also have an API so you could just do arbitrary automatic things like turn on your amp when your TV comes on – assuming your hardware supports it.

This would be better than existing power switches and meters in three ways: firstly, it'd be open source and open hardware, not locked down like most of the existing stuff. You could reprogram the ESP on board, and although it'd come with a web-based management platform you wouldn't be locked into it. Secondly, it'd be designed for hobbyists, so even if you didn't want to use the wifi chip you could connect to some pinouts and use it as a simple power switch interface without worrying about wiring mains power wrong and burning your house down. And thirdly, it'd be much, much cheaper.

Current home automation devices seem to run at hundreds of dollars, but I can't really think of a reason why the materials for something like this would be any more than $10. At that kind of price range you could buy enough to rig up every important device in your house. Maybe you could even build one that replaces your wall switches. You'd really need to be really careful to make sure you got the security right, though.