S0-pulse counter meter

Emoncms Installation
1

Hello everyone, my name is Piet, I am completely new to Emonpi and also to the technology and the forum

I would like to monitor 16 kWh meters with s0 output in Emonpi. I would like to know what I need and how I can get it all working. I am completely new to the system so I have 0 experience. I hope there is someone who can help me with this. to get it all done

Kind regards, Piet van den Broek

2

Welcome, Piet, to the OEM forum.

Your post was held by “the system” because it thought you typed too quickly. If you type directly into the forum page, this will not happen again.

Your pulse counting:

There is whole section about counting pulses from energy meters here in the ‘Learn’ part of the ‘Docs’ (Documents) section of our website:
https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/electricity-monitoring/pulse-counting/index.html

And inside that section, the details about how to connect to your S0 meter are here:
https://docs.openenergymonitor.org/electricity-monitoring/pulse-counting/introduction-to-pulse-counting.html#wired-switched-output-pulse-detection

Have you already bought your emonPi? How many meters do you have, that you want to monitor? Do you want to measure any other energy, electricity or something else?

3

iam from the netherlands and my english is not so good, that’s why I use google translate

I already have a Raspberry Pi 3 with Emon software on it

I want to read 16 meters to monitor consumption at a campsite

Kind regards, Piet van den Broek

4

Are your 16 meters all in the same place?

You can only have two pulse inputs on your emonPi, unfortunately. So although emonCMS will be able to handle and record the pulses from 16 meters, the problem is getting the count for each of the 16 sets of pulses into emonCMS. You will need something else as well as your emonPi.

Am I correct to think that you will charge your visitors for the electricity using the number of pulses recorded from each meter, therefore you must record the exact count? And you cannot use current transformers, which might be wrong by approximately 0.5% ?

@TrystanLea , @awjlogan Have either of you any suggestions for a realistic solution to this?

5

With the existing emon components, there’s not a clean way of doing it.

  • emonPi: the analog inputs are AC coupled so not suitable for pulse counting.
  • emonTH: only handles one pulse input so you would need 16 of them…

I would go for a small adapter board with 16 inputs for something like a Adafruit Feather 32u4 Radio - this has the RFM69 included. All you would need an array of pulse inputs and the firmware could easily be done in Arduino reusing a lot of existing OEM code. There would then be an interfacer for emonCMS.

@pietvdbroek - thoughts on that suggestion?

6

Should mention this assumes you want the logging to be remote from the Pi you have and it has its own radio receiver installed. If the Pi is local to the meters, you could connect the meters directly to the Pi (probably through a small adapter). Let us know what you’d prefer and we can go further :slight_smile: