/smartmeter

Read electricity meter with a simple IR dongle

Primary LanguageC++MIT LicenseMIT

Read electricity meter with a simple IR dongle

The Smartmeter project enables the readout of the IR data signal from my smart energy meter. To get started, an Arduino with an IR phototransistor can be used. Later I have built my own IR dongle with an USB interface for permanent installation on top of the energy meter.

The Smartmeter daemon outputs a JSON formatted string and sends it to a MQTT broker on the network. From there, the data is forwarded into a time series database for permanent data storage and for visualization. The complete software stack consists of the following components, which need to be installed and configured separately:

  • Smartmeter daemon with IR dongle for data readout
  • Mosquitto MQTT broker
  • Node-RED (MQTT client, PostgreSQL and optional email alerts)
  • PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB and pg_cron extensions
  • Grafana for visualization

The software stack is light weight in terms of necessary resources and runs on any SBC such as an Odroid C2/C4 or Raspberry Pi 3/4.

Documentation

The project documentation covers the IR dongle hardware, software configuration and database setup and is located on separate Wiki pages.

Changelog

All notable changes and releases are documented in the CHANGELOG.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license - see the LICENSE file for details