Continuous monitoring on the emonpi

Hardware emonPi
1

After looking at how to get continuous monitoring working on the Pi - I’ve realised it’s a little bit out of my depth for now and I simply don’t have the free time yet to go into the fine detail, setup environments and practise some firmware loads.

However, it does seem that a few years ago, there was a fully developed version of the code which incorporated continuous monitoring. Could anyone explain what stopped this and made discrete monitoring the only option?
So far, my understanding is that there is a conflict caused with the RF component on the emonpi. But if there’s no requirement to use this (i.e. a standalone emonpi) theoretically you can alter the emontx-cm sketch to get the benefit of it.

The github repositories do still mention continuous-monitoring, but I’m not able to find such a branch and presume it’s a left-over of the old versions?

If anyone does have such a ready-to-go hex for the emonpi they’d be willing to share, it would be greatly appreciated!

2

I’m not aware of a continuous-monitoring sketch for the analogue front end of the emonPi. The plan always was to introduce the CM version to the emonTx first, and then tackle the emonPi.

As you rightly point out, the need for the processor to handle the radio traffic as well as the continuous data from the ADC will put a very heavy load on it, and my fear is it won’t be possible given the way that the RFM interfaces with the processor and the way that JeeLib interfaces with the RFM.

A non-RF version of the emonPi would certainly be a significantly simpler project, and should be easy enough to do. But as I see it, there is a significant snag because it would mean that to expand the system, you would need to revert (for the present) to the DS sketch, or add an emonBase to handle the radio traffic from the other sensor nodes.