I am currently running a current cost ENVI via serial into a RPi, that also has a DHT22 attached to the Pi, all being wrapped up and uploaded to emoncms cloud server via a weird old set of python and perl script I found/modified. The DHT22 humidity sensor hasn’t worked quite right for ages, it used to have spurious high values, now the value just sits at 1. I replaced the actual sensor twice, so I think maybe it’s the Pi or something.
If I wanted to start over, and do things “clean”, and my goal was to run 1 energy monitoring (just on the main panel, in the US), and a pair of temp/humidity sensors (wireless on a different part of the house), what do I need?
I can’t quite tell if the temp/humidity hardware board kit is supposed to interface with the emonPi or what, does the Emon Pi have 433mhz on board?
It seems like purchasing 1 emonPi with 2 CTs, and putting that down by the panel, and then getting 2 of the temp/humidity modules is all I’d need. Is that correct? Then the temp/humidity modules are configured to send data to the emonPi, which wraps things up and uploads via API to the cloud (which is what I want, it’s worth it to not have to run my own DB and maintain port forwarding etc).
It does indeed. (Note it is MHz - Mega, not milli)
That sounds good to me. The emonTH does send the data by 433 MHz band ISM radio to the emonPi, and the emonPi is ready to receive them both.
You’ll need a minor edit (i.e. add your APIKey) to the emonPi to give it the necessary permission to write your data into emoncms.org, but bear in mind you can simultaneously save the data in the (different) copy of emonCMS that runs on the emonPi anyway - so you’ll have, if you have the same feeds (a feed is the database for one measurement) set up both on your own emonCMS and on emoncms.org, two sets of data.
I mentioned emonCMS on the emonPi is not the same as emoncms.org. One of the main differences is that you’re able to do far more customisation on your own copy, and it has a few features that aren’t available on emoncms.org
I was in a similar situation re: CurrentCost a couple of years back and then forced through component failure to discover this site; all the old kit went in the bin and I’ve now got an emonpi, two TX, three TH, two relays, OpenEVSE and a host of other stuff linking in over MQTT.
Ok, that’s great. Thank you for the information. Now I just need to carve out the time to configure all the stuff. I enjoy this type of work but you know how it is, evenings seem like they fly by.
Awesome, that’s good to know. How much effort did it take you to set it all up? I’m in IT and technically am a programmer, so have some background in coding and databases, but I’m not a guru by any means and am only sort of bare bones on my linux, although I’ve been messing around with linux off and on for 10 years or more.
I lot depends on what you want to do but in terms of monitoring voltage, current, temperature etc. it’s literally just a case of plugging everything in and configuring the inputs (which will magically appear on the emonpi) into feeds. The FAQ stuff on this site is useful but it isn’t complicated and if you can’t find the answer, ask and you can guarantee someone will know.
I upload my PV data to PV output and found some code which I modified to keep that going with the new kit - just some simple Python and I’ve written other stuff since to control other things based on the feed data.
I’m also a coder and still do that for my day job but with other languages - I work for a large database company.