A colleague and I are in the process of creating a user-friendly manual for OEM to help those with little experience in open source software/hardware and monitoring get started. Our plan is to build from the videos already available by OEM and create guides and videos to fill in and clarify certain steps for beginners (we found the guide to be difficult to comprehend at times).
We were wondering if someone else had already started something like this and would be willing to share their ideas with us, so we donât overlap our creation with things that already exist. We feel that it would be redundant to create something that is already available.
If something like this doesnât exist, then does anyone have any ideas about what things we should make more user friendly?
Thank you @TrystanLea for your offer. We are finalising a simple energy monitor guide that takes a beginner through all the base knowledge and will be posting it on here soon.
In the meantime I was hoping more experienced users could give us feedback on these flowcharts we have created.
The first flowchart showcases the steps required to go from no monitoring to creating a simple energy use monitor:
Lastly we created an additional flowchart to help those who have a specific configuration installed but struggle with radio signal. However, we werenât sure whether, once you had bought an EmonTx with the battery power option, you could power the EmonTx with the UK plug?
These have been created based on the information and guidance available on the OEM guide. We have no experience carrying out the installation process so feedback on these would be highly appreciated!
I canât read most of the text on those (jpeg files for small text? really?), so itâs hard to comment.
I think my best advice to you would be to trawl the forums (both old and new) and see what hardware has been recommended in various situations, and why.
My approach, when somebody brings a problem to the forum, is to first find out what they want to measure, and where in the world they are. That will provide an initial list of the hardware they need, and then refine that based on the practicality of the installation. And donât forget, different countries and jurisdictions have widely different electrical systems, different practices and different regulations, so an installation in the UK may well be unworkable, impractical, illegal or all of those things somewhere else.
And I think that if you try to cater for every situation imaginable, youâll fail, and that will be because the Emon system is really so very flexible that there will be just too many possible combinations to cover. I think you need - initially at least - to look at the most common situations and cover those.
Thanks @Rolop I will take a closer look at what youâve done later but it looks really good as an initial concept, I like the idea of the flow chart to work out the step to take, thanks for sharing!
We are writing the section on EmonTx + ESP8266 and run into a little misshap. Does anyone know what the jumper JP2 is and where I can find it on my emonTx? Would it be possible for anyone to send a picture so we can include it on the guide?
Try looking at the PCB layout & circuit diagrams in the Wiki (âHardware Docsâ), which you can get to via the Resources section - thatâs in the menu bar at the top of this (and every) page.
Sorry about the quality of the image, I canât get it to a higher resolution without having to pay for the software I used⌠I managed to read it by clicking on the image and zooming but I will try to work on this issue so that it is easily readable on the guide document.
Thank you for your advice, we will make sure to include a disclaimer to highlight that the countryâs regulations should be checked beforehand and that this advice is limited. For more information on specific and complex systems they should refer to the forum. We will only be covering the basics using OEM only (may include some information about using MBus to monitor HPs).
For the diagrams in âLearnâ that I did, I used Inkscape. The format is svg, vector graphics rather than raster, which means they are more or less infinitely scalable. Iâm not saying itâs easy to use, but the price is good.
