Bringing system up to date / Adding OpenHab

Hi All

Back in 2014 i purchased a emonTx V3 and a Receiver Board to connect o my Raspberry Pi, Generally worked very well, Had a few hiccups such as the SD card going bad, Also occasionally fails to receive data from the Tx, think the Pi might be located a little to far away from the Tx.

What i want to do now is bring it up to date, and also introduce OpenHab, I was thinking of buying a new Pi 3 and putting the receiver board on this and locating it a little closer to the Tx,

If i then install emonSD-03May16 am i right in thinking i will have emoncms & OpenHab running on the Pi?
And OpenHab will be able to use data from emoncms? so for example if Solar in is greater than X and house usage is less then Y Switch on Socket 1?
Assume i will need a transmitter added to the Pi such as an OOK for the lightwaveRF sockets? Will i be able to do this with the Receiver Board already connected?

Thank You
Keith

Hi keith,

Good to hear you are keen to upgrade. There have been lots of updates since you first purchased your system.

Correct, you can use the backup / migration tool to migrate your data from our old Raspberrry Pi if needed. Yes, openHAB running on the new SD card image will use data from Emoncms (via MQTT). See OpenHAB integration section of the user guide. OpenHAB will come pre-setup with an example.

You will need to add this customisation. You might also find nodeRED useful for such automation: https://guide.openenergymonitor.org/integrations/nodered

Yes, you will need to add an OOK module. see LWRF user guide: https://guide.openenergymonitor.org/integrations/lightwaverf/

Hi Glyn

Thanks very helpful,

Regarding the Receiver board i have my old order details say it is a RFM12Pi, this is different to the board currently on sale? will it work with a Pi3? whats the difference between them?

So i take this off my current Pi, stick it on the Pi 3 it covers the first 5 pairs of pins on the GPIO header, This just leaves Pin 12 free to add the OOK module to the Pi but can i share a 5V Pin with the RFM12PI that is sat on both?
Also being a standard R Pi i don’t have the antenna of the emonPi to use with it, any recommendations?

Thank You

We currently sell the RFM69Pi which uses the newer RFM69CW radio module which has replaced the RFM12B. On paper it should have a bit more range than the RFM12B but we have noticed much difference in practice. Your RFM12Pi should work fine on a Pi3 with the new image.

Important: You will need to set com_baud = 9600 in emonhub.conf on the new image to work with your RFM12Pi. This can be done via the Emoncms local web interface. Default emonhub.conf:

That should be no problem.

A 165mm wire (1/4 wave, assuming 433Mhz) wire whip antenna will work fine.

Excellent, The new Pi(s) are already on order, got a few new things they are going into,
I will get an order in for the OOK transmitter and hunt down some Lightwave sockets,

Also looking at the energenie products which use OOK and seem to work with OpenHab.

Thanks for all info Glyn

Keith

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Just to complete this thread the new Pi arrived and is currently collecting data from the emonTX and out putting to ‘My Solar’ must say loving the new version of emoncms, wish i had kept the old one upto date,
I have not imported old data, decided to start again clean,
Am now trying to work out how to use Node-Red :slight_smile:

Thanks

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