Kinetic and Measurement Project Ideas

For the first half of the semester in Energy I will be creating two projects, one primary project on the topic of measuring energy and another shorter secondary project exploring kinetic energy.

My initial inspiration around the topic of kinetic energy involves measuring time. My two favorite time pieces at home are an old Waltham mechanical pocket watch I inherited from my great grandfather and an annual clock my husband and I were gifted at our wedding.

I would love to create a hybrid of the two: a very slow mechanical clock that rotates approximately once per year. I have seen some examples of simple wooden clocks and would like to find a method of using the cycle of a day to power the movement of a pendulum without any of the electrical brains that would involve counting time through a quartz crystal oscillator.

For the longer measurement project I am interested in measuring and breaking down my active and passive electricity usage at home then using that data to generate some info graphics. This past summer I purchased a few WiFi energy monitoring smart plugs and plan to make use of these to analyze active and passive (vampire) power use for all of the devices around my home to have a better sense of how my total electricity use accumulates.