I have an existing emonpi system that monitors my home and shop. It consists of an emonpi, 3 x emontx4 4channel models, and a emonth5. It has been converted to an SSD storage system, has operated very reliably for close to a year now and I am loathe to mess with it.
I would like to set up another parallel emon pi system. One that I could mess with, a test system.
I see that the emonpi pcb is discontinued and now the emontx4 6 channel is now the newest model of emon goodness.
Anyone care to comment on how I might reasonably achieve my parallel test system?
I don’t believe you. I think you mean an emonTx 3.2 or 3.4, and an emonTH 1.5
If you don’t want the two systems to interact at all, it’s going to be difficult, because although we’ve changed the r.f. library we use, and it uses a slightly different frequency, it’s still close enough for the two systems to jam each other occasionally, even though neither is able to receive the other’s messages - unless you reload the software.
What sort of messing do you envisage? If you’re content with a wired system, you could turn the radio off in the emonTx4 and use the USB connection to a Raspberry Pi (bare - without the RFM69Pi ISM band radio that you would otherwise use to receive from the emonTx); or you could wait for the Wi-Fi add-on module for the emonTx4 to become available (when, I don’t know). Without the ISM band radio, the two systems won’t clash.
Thank you for replying so quickly. You are correct that I was playing fast and loose with the identity of the pcbs. The 4 channel pcbs are indeed the emon Tx 3.4 model and the emonTH 1.5 designation is correct. I used the ident numbers from the emoncms feeds list.
I would like to use an ESP-32 to measure temperatures and use the emoncms to record and graph these temps. Maybe thermocouples to record exhaust gas temps. I can build the ESP side of things but dont understand the software well enough. I would like to integrate these temps into emoncms for recording and graphing. Because I expect that I will not achieve this the first time, I would like a testing system that I can restore to a default level when the inevitable screwups occur.
Ok, that sounds a lot simpler than it might have been.
I suggest that you’ll be able to co-locate the ESP32 and the RPi, in this case there will be no ISM band radio involved and no clash with the existing system. I don’t know much about the ESP32, I suggest a plain serial interface to the RPi is the easiest, and if you send your data in one of the formats acceptable to one of the many ‘Interfacers’ that emonHub provides it should all work (famous last words). So you might like to go through the Docs section and get a rough idea of what is what. I assume this is the area where you don’t understand the software well enough.
When you come to integrating this with your existing system, emonHub is capable of despatching the data via your LAN - so you leave the ESP & RPi where they are physically and you’ll have that set of data arriving in both emonCMSs, to be processed or ignored as you wish in each.
Not sure what you will be trying to test. Do you want a parallel emonPi or an install of emoncms?
Simple, use ESPHome or Tasmota.
If DS18B20 sensors, I’d use Tasmota and a Wemos MiniD1 - you don’t need an ESP32 to do that. I have 2 setup like this. Max 8 wired sensors and you need to solder on a resistor. Unfortunately, you need to modify the JSON as the data is not in a format emoncms will understand natively (I use Node-Red). Then send the readings to the emonPi MQTT Broker with the base topic emon.
I think possibly ESPHome might be able to send single readings.
If commercial BLE sensors such as Govee, you could use the ESP32 to read the BLE data and send it on (not done this).
I now have a reliable direct serial connection from a ESP32 to emoncms running on a raspi. I am using a BME280 to generate some temps and other variables. Not as difficult as I expected once I followed the proper formats and got the right com port. Next we will get a raft of DS18B20 sensors and build bigger frames.
One issue is the decimal points. Does the frame lose all the decimal points? It seems I read somewhere about integers only.
I now need to tackle a wifi link instead of a direct connection.
emoncms is software, so the serial connection is to the emonPi?
Not sure what code you used, but you may as well connect the ESP to the Wi-Fi and do it that way. Far simpler ultimately and not tied in terms of location.
I have Emoncms running on a raspi 3+. I have a BME280 on the Esp32 transmitting to the serial port.
I have installed an emonhub serial interfacer and added a node 99 to identify the data from the Esp32.
The Tx and Rx pins on the Esp32 are connected by wire to the Rx and Tx pins on the raspi.
The emonhub now shows the data frame coming in from node99 every 20 seconds.
I would like to connect the Esp to emoncms by wi-fi and have a portable esp32 gathering data from where ever i put it but I don’t know how to do that yet. Any help doing that would be greatly appreciated.