Was at a friends today and he showed me an energy monitor that he had bought and was using to monitor his electricity supply. I was like “hmm… this could be something fun to attach to an XCore and get some graphs out of”.
My thought is to use my XC-3 (or maybe get an XC-2) to connect to an energy monitor receiver – or hack/make a receiver and then push the data somewhere useful via Ethernet. In fact I could combine it with my network monitor, ditch the screen and have it push the all the different types of data out into some nice pretty graphs. Anyway, enough brain dump – onto the hardware!
My proposal is to use a Current Cost Envi (CC128) device. There is a helpful CC128 write up from dale lane. It has several nice features:
- The receiver has a RS232 output
- The receiver outputs XML from the RS232
- The system has support for up to 9 individual appliance monitoring (IAMs)
Some thoughts on software/graphing features:
- Display a comprehensive history (device can output real-time, or 2hr block data)
- Calculate some averages (particularly for time of day, month, season)
- Plot electricity use vs. temperature? – the relationship should be pretty obvious… but I like pretty graphs
- Plot the electricity generation stats and calculate my carbon footprint (ooh err!) – see Amee
Could even add some X10 stuff in there to… the possibilities are endless – watch this space!
Update: CC128 connector pinout– looks like you might be able to reprogram the internal PIC as well!
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