I created the Off-On box as part of the Off-On project that was already running at Wieden and Kennedys London. The Off-On project basically calculates all the energy costs made by the building and compares them to last years costs. Any savings are then donated to worthy causes. So for example when lights are turned off in the building in London, lights are turned on in a Nariobi classroom.

The current setup to collect the company’s energy data used a current cost machine to read in the energy values. This data is then read through a serial connection with Arduino and sent to a laptop which then sends the data to the server. This worked fine and had been running for quite a few months like this but to move this project on from an internal project and roll it out as product, we needed to create a custom piece of electronics that would replace the laptop as the middle man. So I created the Off-On Box. The current cost meter is now plugged directly in to this and then an Arduino Ethernet Board is used to send the data straight to the server. As the Ethernet connection often drops out I also created a reset shield that could sit on top of the Ethernet Shield and restart it every three minutes. Voila! This has now replaced the laptop. :-).

Skills used

Arduino code, Electronics Prototyping