This projects has everything you need to start monitoring and recording your electric energy usage with a Raspberry PI and Arduino. You get easy access to a mobile-friendly daily graph and all-time stats.
It is completely non-intrusive and works by watching the blinks given out by a house-hold electric meter. Each blink of the supplier's meter will represent 0.001kWh of energy usage. We use a cheap Arduino nano (clone or genuine) to monitor blnks, then a Raspberry PI runs a rich web interface with daily graphs showing peaks and troughs.
- An Arduino with LDR connected and USB cable
- A Raspberry PI
- An electric meter which has a blinking LED to indicate current consumption
- Open the arduino/flasher.ino sketch in the Arduino IDE
- Select your device and flash the code.
- Install LDR and signal LED to correct pins as per the sketch.
- Clone the repository and then install the software:
npm install bower -g
npm install
bower install
If your Raspberry PI has less than 512MB RAM you may want to enable a swapfile due to memory needed when building SQLite
-
node appstarts the program, navigate to http://localhost/ or the IP address of the PI. -
Initialize the empty energy DB with the following command:
sqlite3 energy.db < provision.sql
- Flash your Arduino with the software and attach its LDR to the blinking LED on your energy meter.
- On boot-up start the
meter/meter.pyprogram. This will then start logging data from the Arduino.
I have run this system at my own house for over a year and have had no issues to speak of. It has been interesting to monitor the usage of various appliances and what causes a peak and what my daily usage is like.
Copyright Alex Ellis 2016