Arduino with emonTx shield als emonbase

Hardware emonTx
1

Hello,

I’m new to
the scene and I was wondering if it is possible to use an Arduino with emonTx
shield as emonbase or is the Raspberry the only preferred MCU?

If possible
with the Arduino, will it also be capable to collect and send info to Emoncms
from other emon devices like emonTh while still monitoring its own CT and puls
input?

Are there
sketches available for this setup?

Thanks and
kind regards,

Rogier

2

I’m afraid a little confusion has crept in here. The Arduino with an emonTx Shield measures electrical power and optionally temperature, and it’s what we call a Sensor Node. It transmits the data, usually wirelessly, to an emonBase. The Raspberry Pi with the RFM69Pi radio module is an emonBase. The emonPi is a cut-down version of the emonTx and a RPi emonBase all inside one box.

The emonTH is another sensor node and it too can send its data to an emonBase. EmonCMS is the database and user interface which receives, stores and displays the data. EmonCMS can run on your RPi, or on another server somewhere.

All the software is available on GitHub - a links to Resources is at the top of the page.

3

Hi,
Thanks for the reply.

I just thought it was maybe possible for the Arduino + emonTx to act like an emonPi? Use the Arduino instead of the Raspberry.
Saw some articles about NanodeRF but wonders if the performance is same?

4

The NanodeRF is only capable of forwarding the data to another server running emonCMS. The emonPi/emonBase is capable of both forwarding the data and running emonCMS.

There is nowhere near enough processing power within an Arduino to run emonCMS.

5

Ok, I see.

For the moment I’m running emoncms on my Synology and have no need to run emoncms on a Raspberry
I bought the emonTx shield for Arduino with the idea that the Arduino can sent the data to the Synology by LAN.
Will an Arduino be powerfull enough to both collect data from other nodes by RF and it’s own data (4x CT, 1x pulse) and transmit it to emoncms?
Is there really a need for a NanodeRF for passing the data?

6

I don’t know that anyone has done that. I presume your Arduino would have to have an Ethernet Shield, and that it would listen on the radio for the other nodes as well as measuring 4 CTs and watching its pulse input. I don’t know the Arduino range, and it depends very much on exactly how you are doing the ‘internal’ measurements. I think anything using the Atmel 328P would probably be OK if you are running the ‘discrete sample’ sketch, but it would struggle and might well fail with the ‘continuous’ sketch, as the processor is then running close to maximum capacity just on that sketch alone.