TAP-TST10 is most cheapest power consumption monitoring device currently in Japan. I’ve evaluated and find some pros and cons.

The Device

SANWA Supply sells valious device around daily consumer computing use in Japan and sells “Watt Checker” series in order to measure power consumption of your digital device such as your laptop computer and in-house servers. You can just see current value using most of devices, can send it out to other computer via USB cable using TAP-TST10 and it costs about $50 in the street in contrast to other devices which costs about $200. So I gonna try to connect them and see some. Some good guy archived linux box to identify TAP-TST10.(link) I’ve written some wrapper script for munin-node and it works fine.

Pros

Cheapest power measurement device which have USB output connection among Japan.

Cons

Undisclosed protocol for USB connection. There is some failure when you connect.

Comments

Most of Japanese devices around power measurement have poor and insufficiently disclosed function and expensive. It needs to be improved.