WattEye
David Smart.
0
replies
Monitoring energy is a popular thing to do. Taking care not to increase the energy consumption much - just for the sake of monitoring it - seems reasonable too.
In 2001, I cobbled together a "whole-house" energy monitor. The electric meter was the older "spinning disk" style. That disk had a hole in it, so I created a small infrared transmitter and receiver pair and used that to detect the hole. The time between pulses translates to the current rate of energy consumption.
The data was consumed by an always on PC, running MRTG. With this several graphs were available showing highly detailed consumption for the last day and a half, and then in successive charts for week, month and year.
WattWatcher original
| The original system used MRTG to graph the data. I used that from 2001 until just recently. This design used a pair of 555 timers at the meter end, and an RS-232 port on the "server" end. Mixed in was some custom perl and MRTG, web server, etc. |  ......................................................................................................... |
WattWatcher renewed
A few years back, the electric meter was replaced with a new digital meter. No more spinning disk, but there was an IR LED on top. With a new sensor, a new server, and the thought to use the mbed, I created something that might be priced beyond the consumer pain threshold, but the fun-factor has been high!
Architecture
 | The old, compared to the new architecture. |
Program
Import programWattEye
Watt Eye has a simple purpose - monitor pulses that comes from the home electric meter, measure the interval between the pulses and compute the real-time energy being consumed, broadcast that onto the network using UDP packets so that CouchCalendar has something to do and display, and publish the data to a web server, where it can be used (graphed or placed into a db).
Last commit 02 Mar 2019 by David Smart
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