I’ve just been playing around with Yahoo Pipes for the first time in ages to see if it might be useful in mangling data feeds from Pachube. (Would have been useful to have tried this out before homecamp but never mind!) Early signs looked good- falling off a log looks difficult in comparison to getting Pachube data into a Yahoo Pipe. Having said that, finding data feeds to start working with is not so easy. If I want to start doing something with power data, I have to manually find the relevant feeds on the Pachube site with a tag search. It would be great to be able to get a feed of data feeds; that would be useful for keeping up with new data feeds that get added to Pachube as well as being a useful input to a Yahoo Pipe.
So the simple example pipe for part 1 does just this kind of aggregation except that, because it’s a hack, it only includes a specified set of feeds. The default user input list is just the feed IDs I manually copied from that tag search for ‘power’:
It should work using my API key if you don’t have one, but you’ll need your own if you clone the feed to do something more interesting.
Coming up in part 2: doing something useful with the data.
Notes from a small field 
Hey Mate – happy New Year!
I haven’t had a chance to look in to this in any great detail – but I’m potentially very interested in this!
When we eventually get back to the UK I’d love to be able to remotely monitor the temperature in the house and be able to control the thermostat accordingly.
We were often coming home late and had set the heating on for 4 hours for no benefit…. there must surely be a funky way of solving this!
Is that what pachube can help do?
I also couldn’t find an IP enabled thermostat that did what I wanted (i.e. being able to control it over IP!)
Hello! Hope our non-red envelope made it through to you ok!
Pachube is certainly good for remote monitoring, and by connecting up different environments you could do things like get the heating to come on as you leave the office. For direct control sending your house a direct twitter message, via SMS or a mobile browser, would be very simple as well, if you’re late home for other reasons.
Don’t yet have a thermostat I can control via my home server but it’s on the to do list! (I know someone who was thinking of getting such a thing in the near future- I’ll try and get the link off him, although it wasn’t cheap.)
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