A Docker based Home Assistant interface for LeChacal.com's RPICT's Energy Monitoring Sensors

Docker Hub: bushrangers/ha-lechacal-mqtt:latest

This project is a simple lightweight docker container, designed to read data from the LeChacal Energy Monitoring PCB's and then transmit data to a Home Assistant server (via MQTT) as part of a wider energy monitoring solution...

The program ** should ** support all LeChacal devices that communicate via Serial, however at the time of writing I only have a RPICT7V1_v2.0 to test it on.

Lastly, the use of a CT Clamp's to monitor energy consumption on your individual circuits, is a great addition to a fully featured smart home, and the Voltronic HA Solar Monitor (if you are running this also).

The program is designed to be run in a Docker Container, and can be deployed on a Raspberry PI, inside your breaker box, using a DIN rail mount such as the Modulbox, from Italtronic.

Supported LeChacal PCB's

RPICT3V1 - 3 CT 1 Voltage.
RPICT3T1 - 3 CT 1 Temperature
RPICT4V3_v2.0 - 4 CT 3 AC Voltage.
RPICT7V1_v2.0 - 7 CT 1 AC Voltage.
RPICT8 - 8 CT

Note, if your device is not listed here you can create a json mapping file - Please look at the examples in the config/device-mapping directory.

Prerequisites

Docker
Docker-compose
LeChacal CT Clamp PCB
Home Assistant running with a MQTT Server

Configuration & Standing Up

It's pretty straightforward, just clone down the sources, set the configuration in the config/ directory, and copy your template depending on what model device you run:

# Clone down sources on the host you want to monitor...
git clone https://github.com/ned-kelly/docker-lechacal-homeassistant.git /opt/ha-lechacal-mqtt
cd /opt/ha-lechacal-mqtt

# Configure your MQTT server settings, offsets, serial port, etc...
vi config/config.yml

You may also need to configure your Raspberry PI's /boot/config.txt file like so:

[all]
enable_uart=1
uart_enable=yes

And disable the Serial Console output using the raspi-config tool.

Once you've configured your settings & Pi, you can just stand up the container with docker-compose.

docker-compose up -d

Note:

builds on docker hub are currently for linux/amd64,linux/arm/v6,linux/arm/v7,linux/arm64,linux/386 -- If you have issues standing up the image on your Linux distribution (i.e. An old Pi/ARM device) you may need to manually build the image to support your local device architecture - This can be done by uncommenting the build flag in your docker-compose.yml file.
The default docker-compose.yml file includes Watchtower, which can be configured to auto-update this image when we push new changes to github - Please uncomment if you wish to auto-update to the latest builds of this project.

Integrating into Home Assistant.

Providing you have setup MQTT with Home Assistant, the device will automatically register in your Home Assistant when the container starts for the first time -- You do not need to manually define any sensors.

From here you can setup Graphs and regular text value sensors to display sensor data.