Show HN: Terminal dashboard that throttles my PC during peak electricity rates

Summary

CLI dashboard showing real-time and historical power draw readings from a Kasa smart plug The Challenge: Performance vs. Power Costs High-performance computing often means high electricity bills, especially in regions with time-of-use pricing. Finding the balance between computational power and energy efficiency becomes critical when running resource-intensive workloads. Understanding Power Usage I have been setting up a workstation for off-loading compute-intensive LLM workflows from my desktop. The build includes dual Epyc CPUs with plans to add 4 GPUs for up to 128GB VRAM to run multiple agents in parallel. A key constraint was ensuring the system could run comfortably on a standard household 120V outlet. Since I already use smart plugs throughout my home, I added one to monitor the workstation’s power consumption. However, checking power statistics using the kasa phone app or Home Assistant dashboard proved cumbersome, especially when I already maintain a terminal window with monitoring tools like htop, nvtop, and nload in a 2×2 grid on my secondary display. TP-link Kasa EP25 Smart Plug Building a Terminal-Based Solution After sketching a simple wireframe for what I wanted: a clean, terminal-based UI that would display power consumption data already being collected by my Home Assistant instance through the TP-Link integration. After getting the data access sorted, I spent some time with ‘Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking’ iterating on the CLI structure and features. The result: WattWise, a lightweight CLI tool that pulls power usage data from smart plugs (either directly or through Home Assistant) and presents it in a clean, information-dense dashboard right in the terminal. WattWise Demo Key Features Monitoring Features Real-time power monitoring with wattage and current display Color-coded power values (green for low usage, yellow for medium, red for high) Historical consumption charts directly in the terminal While smart plug measurements aren’t lab-grade (typically...