Blog
OpenEnergyMonitor

Documentation reorganisation proposal

The current front page


It has been pointed out several times that the documentation on this site is hard to follow. We've been giving this some thought and have come up with a plan for hopefully what will be a clearer structure.

Here are our initial thoughts:

1) We start with the following headings, these form the main menu:

Community | Applications | Modules | Fundamentals | Tools | Archive

These headings contain:

Community
  • Forums
  • Development plans
  • Links to community builds and blogs
Applications
Applications are step by step guides of how to assemble modules to create a particular system. They start with a short description then a step-by-step type structure. Detailed application discussion would be on a second page or blog post with link through.
  • Power monitoring
  • Solar PV
  • Solar hot water
  • Pulse counting
  • Heatpump monitoring
Applications reference through to modules below.

Separate github folder for each application containing sketches for all the modules that make up the application.

Modules
  • Hardware
    • emontx
    • emonglcd
    • emonbase
    • See-a-watt
  • Software
    • emoncms
    • Pachube
Each module contains the pages:
  • page1: overview + features (maybe use it: application list is referenced here?)
  • page2: built it / install it / buy it
  • page3: detailed design documentation
All emon system sections reference through to fundamentals section below

Fundamentals

Getting started with arduino, uploading sketches etc.

Electricity monitoring
  • AC Theory - Introduction
  • AC Theory - Advanced
  • AC Theory - 3 phase
  • Power in different countries
  • Non-invasive
    • CT sensors - Introduction
    • CT sensors - Advanced
    • Current only - Single Phase
    • Current and voltage - Single Phase
    • 3-phase Monitoring
  • Invasive
    • AC shunt
    • DC Shunt & hall effect sensing
  • Appliance inference - labs
  • Interfacing with inverters
Pulse counting
  • Single pulse counting
  • 12 input pulse counting
Temperature
  • DS18B20 temperature sensing
  • PT1000 temperature sensing
Networking
  • RF
  • RFM12B
  • xbee, zigbee, old rf
  • Master/slave simple serial networking
  • Ethernet
Displays
  • GLCD
  • 7segment, 3310
Storage
  • USB Pen drive data-logging
  • SD Card logging
Control
  • Relay
Firmware
  • Watchdog timer
  • Structures for transmitting data.
  • Sleep mode
  • String constructor
Github sketches for the fundamentals section could be contained in one github folder called fundamentals.

Tools
Tools that can be useful in debugging / development of systems:
  • VI Sampler
  • KST based graphing and statistics
  • Programming nanode with arduino
Archive
Items for archive

Other changes
We've disabled comments on pages, the thinking here is that its getting quite hard to navigate the page comments as conversations at different dates and topics are all getting mixed together and that it would be better to have these discussions on the forum, where each forum thread has its own clear topic.

Every page can be put in a hierarchical order such as modules/hardware/emontx making navigation clearer.

A site map with all of the above.

Do you think this is a good idea? 
Any suggestions on how the website content can be better arranged would be greatly welcomed!
Thankyou! To engage in discussion regarding this post, please post on our Community Forum.