Emoncms alpha is up!!
As I mentioned in the last post Carlos, Suneil and I have been working on an energy visualisation web application, its a project that's been in development slowly for about half a year now but has only really started to take shape with quite a bit of work in the last month.
Today is a milestone because its got to a point where it is hopefully functional enough to be useful and so here it is a very much alpha release.
The name is emoncms for energy monitoring content management system. And the aim of the project is to develop an open source energy monitoring web app to make it easier to:
1) Understand our whole energy picture ( see screen below )
2) Understand the energy choices that we have
3) Keep track of our energy use and generation over time
Main features
- Open-source, downloadable, customisable, deployable on any server in the same way as platforms such as drupal and wordpress etc are.
- Build a whole energy picture by a mixture of manual entry categories and automatic monitoring categories. The whole energy picture intends to follow the approach of
David MacKay's book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air: linking through to the book and using primarily the kwh/d unit. It also takes a lot of inspiration from Saul Griffiths wattzon in terms of quite a few of the core features.
- Energy categories are modules (in a similar way to drupal modules) making the application quite extendible, if there's an energy category that you'd like that is not available then you can develop and add it.
- Renewable energy options suggestions, this could be really interesting, imagine every single type of renewable and efficiency option being related to energy use categories making it possible to quickly get a rough idea for better heating methods, energy saving by switching to an electric car and so on.
- Connect up to energy monitoring equipment: Extensive and powerful data storage, processing, visualisation, sharing system for energy monitoring data (or any sensor data) from hardware energy monitoring systems. (see kwhd graph screen below)Input processing: scale, offset, multiply with another input, log to feed, log to kwhd feed
You can download the alpha version and read more about it on the main emoncms development page here: emoncms dev
The current version is very much work in progress. There is very little error checking, input checking, security implemented. This is all to come. If you have expertise in these areas or would like to get involved in development of other parts of this you would be most welcome, just get in contact via comments on the emoncms dev page or via the forum.
Thanks a lot! To engage in discussion regarding this post, please post on our Community Forum.