Welcome to the AMEE Community, a place for users of AMEEconnect and AMEEdiscover to ask questions and get answers, as well as discuss anything related to using AMEE.
What if every computer knew how much carbon it was generating as it ran?
Hi guys, this is a general idea I wanted to throw out, to the world to see how you'd go about measuring it.
In general computers, are pretty good at telling you how much disk space, battery power and memory they have, or how hard they're working.
In fact they're so good at this that it's possible to get lots of very pretty graphs of this kind of information when running websites.
What if computers knew how much carbon they were causing to be emitted too, based on where in the world they're being used, or what kind of power the tend to run on?
For example:
* datacentres tend to have information about how efficient they are, so you could work that out.
* laptops know how much power they're drinking in, or burning - if you know what was powering the grid, you could get an idea of how much coal is being burned for you to run it
This is just a thought experiment at the mo, but maybe one that might make a cool innovation project in future.
What would be the simplest possible you would need to build to model even halfway effectively?
In general computers, are pretty good at telling you how much disk space, battery power and memory they have, or how hard they're working.
In fact they're so good at this that it's possible to get lots of very pretty graphs of this kind of information when running websites.
What if computers knew how much carbon they were causing to be emitted too, based on where in the world they're being used, or what kind of power the tend to run on?
For example:
* datacentres tend to have information about how efficient they are, so you could work that out.
* laptops know how much power they're drinking in, or burning - if you know what was powering the grid, you could get an idea of how much coal is being burned for you to run it
This is just a thought experiment at the mo, but maybe one that might make a cool innovation project in future.
What would be the simplest possible you would need to build to model even halfway effectively?
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
There's a nice little commandline tool to show battery cycles, percentage and power draw on OSX:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/498511?start=0&tstart=0
And there's some more here:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050213125925746
Also one here on stack overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/272552/battery-status-in-osx
You could use them in a daemon to take a sample every N minutes to update the kind of table, /proc/carbon might show, that would take into account what kind of power you're running on.
This might be a nice example to try building into a new category and emission factor for AMEE. One to run by Dr Andrew Berkeley, methinks.