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OpenEnergyMonitor

emonGLCD V1.3 Switches - fix!

It was mentioned in this blog post regarding the current version of the emonGLCD (V1.3) that a hardware error rendered the push switches un-usable. This is not the case any more!



It turns out that this error can be fixed in software. The switches can be made to work with no hardware modifications. The emonGLCD tester sketch has been updated with the required fix.



Here are the details:

The push switches are connected ADC 1,2 and 5 (digital 15,16 and 19). When pressed they are pulled low through resistor R5.
The Atmega328 has internal pull-up resistors (20K) which can be enabled by setting the port as output and doing a high digital write:


pinMode(switchpin, INPUT); 


digitalWrite(switchpin, HIGH);

The switches are active low, meaning a logic 0 will be read on digital 15,16 and 19 when the relevant switch is pressed. 

Thanks to forum member Drsdre for bringing this elegant fix to our attention. This is a real open-hardware success story! If you've bought an emonGLCD from us we will send out on request the three switches to be added free of charge.

We have created an item for the extra switches in the shop, just click buy (it's free) and quote your original order number: http://shop.openenergymonitor.com/displays/

All emonGLCD kits bought from the shop from now on will include the switches.

Happy days.

Open source hardware and the free rider dilemna

I wrote a post on my personal blog about using content from open source projects in general and the Open Energy monitor in particular. Here is an extract of it:


There are now more than 960 registered members in the community, not all of them are active and quite a few contribute actively to the development of the project. But does that mean that the others are just passive members? free riders? is that fair?
I started toying with the idea of using an arduino to monitor electricity consumption about two years ago, and I found out that someone else (Trystan and Glyn and quite a few others) already started developing that idea and sharing their work and findings online. Sharing their work and code online does not only save other people (actually humanity in general) a lot of time and effort, but it also allows for a much wider scope of fellow tinkerers to review and improve that work.
You can read the post on my blog.

Heat Pump Monitoring



Over the past few months we have been working with John Cantor to develop, build and test the potential of a heat pump monitoring system. John has a lifetimes experience of installing, optimising and troubleshooting all types of heat pumps. John runs heatpumps.co.uk and has recently written a very informative book Heat Pumps for the Home. 

The rest of this post will be a guest post by John, over to you:

A heat pump works by transferring heat form one place to another. The electrical input power should be only a fraction (maybe 1/3rd or 1/4) of the available heat delivered. However, the energy efficiency can vary dramatically.  One of the biggest factors that affect this is the working temperatures on the cold (source) and the hot (sink) sides of the system.  This is mainly dictated of system design (radiators/underfloor-heating details etc), but it is also dependent on the way that the system is operated, see www.heatpumps.co.uk

It has become evident that a significant number of the UK’s heat pumps are not reaching their energy-efficiency potential.  In ordered for us to learn how best to install, set-up and operate heat pump systems, some form of real-time monitoring is vital.

We have developed a heatpump-specific variant of the OpenEnegyMonitor wireless web-connected emonBase and emonTx system. Emoncms was used as the web logging and graphing application.

This tool is as valuable as the stethoscope and X ray is to a doctor.  It allows a heating system to be analysed in detail and observed over time so that settings can be modified, use-patterns changed, and system modifications be made.



Our first test was on a heat pump in Scotland.  The owner initially had some very high electricity bills. After a brief spell of monitoring, we were able to pinpoint a few issues.
These related to the electric boost heater coming on unnecessarily and the under-floor heating poorly balanced causing frequent compressor ‘cycling’ (stop/start).  However, this installation was generally a good example. The data can be seen here: http://vis.openenergymonitor.org/pages/heatpump.php

Our second test was on a suspect system in Wales. This showed up some alarming temperatures on the source, and it is apparent that the refrigeration circuit is in poor health.  We plan to repair the system, then compare the graphs before and after.

The graphs below show just one aspect of the analysis.
 

There are many things that can be viewed using the web-dashboard. This includes the refrigeration circuit, the source, the underfloor heating and the compressor power-factor.  

It seems likely that there would be 2 main uses for this monitoring.
1)      For the installer or technically-minded owner to learn how best to operate their system, or to pinpoint any areas for attention and possible modification.
2)      For the owner to see some basic data relating to running cost etc. It would also be used as a remote monitor for holiday accommodation.

The diagram at the top shows the full version, but we are working on a simpler version that focuses on the user-control aspect of a system.

By John Cantor. 

OpenEnergyMonitor Shop is open!

It's taken a bit longer than we expected but finally we can proudly announce that our on-line shop is open for business!

Last week we 'soft launched' the shop to friends, members of the community and our twitter followers. We would like to say a big thank you to everyone who's supported the project by making a purchase through the shop. We have been a little overwhelmed by the level of interest. Again, thank you, you guys are amazing!

In the shop we sell all the components needed to build an Arduino based wireless, web-connected open-source energy monitoring system.

shop.openenergymonitor.com


Component kits for the main OpenEnergyMonitor modules are available in the shop:

emonTx - wireless energy monitoring transmitter unit

emonGLCD - wireless graphical LCD display unit with on-board LED's & sensors

emonBase - NanodeRF wireless, web-connected base station
We also sell CT clip on current sensors, optical utility meter pulse detector sensors, temperature sensor and power supplies.

This system is still in development, it's not an end user consumer product. It is however functional and very flexible in it's current form. Being Arduino based and using standard Arduino software libraries, it's easy to customise the system to meet your needs.

One motivation behind opening the shop is that by selling the units in development kit form it removes barriers to entry and empowers members of the OpenEnergyMonitor community to to get involved with the project. Revenue raised through the shop will go directly towards funding more development and sustaining ourselves so we can continue working on the project.

In the near future we are planning to move to surface mount electronics to enable pre-assembled units. See our newly updated vision page for more information on how we see the project progressing in the future.

emonGLCD V1.3 PCB

Introducing the latest version of the emonGLCD PCB.

This latest version (V1.3) fixes a few minor issues with the previous version (V1.2) but also has some issues of its own. It's a case of two steps forward and one step back.

The good news:

  • The LDR light sensor no longer suffers from reduced sensitivity due to sharing a port with one of the LCD pins 
  • Both tri-colour LEDs are on ATmega328's hardware PWM ports allowing the brightness to be controlled with some nice dimming effects 
  • New new rear silkscreen design featuring a handy RFM12B frequency note area and a large Welsh dragon graphic! 
The bad news:

  • The new feature in V1.3 was suppose to be two extra push switches to allow for future screen navigation. Unfortunately due to a PCB layout error non of the switches on V1.3 are functional. While this is frustrating since it was an easily avoidable mistake the display is still very functional. The current firmware example for single CT energy monitoring and solar PV monitoring don't really make much use of the switch. 
The good news!

Everything else LCD, wireless, ATmega 328, Light sensor, Temperature sensor and multi-colour LED's work great. We have decided to go with the switches not working for now as it still makes a very functional energy monitor display. 


emonGLCD V1.3 front
emonGLCD V1.3 rear 
V1.3 assembled
The schematic and board design for emonGLCD V1.3 are up on solderpad: http://solderpad.com/openenergymon/emonglcd/

The emonGLCD documentation page has been updated with the new port mappings: http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/emonglcd

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!

New emoncms features part 2 - Email notifier

Its good to know as soon as possible if there is an issue with an installed energy monitor, such as the base station dropping offline or a problem with RF connection. This is a rough and ready first implementation of an email notifier for emoncms, that sends you an email to say that a feed has become inactive or a feed is equal to a certain value. No longer are the days when you log in to emoncms just to find that there are two days of missing data as happened to me on feb 6-7 here

A walkthrough

1) Click on a feed in the feed list to bring up the feed view page, scroll down to the bottom and click on set notifications:


2) Select the events that you want notifications for. Notification on value and on inactive both work. Periodic notification is yet to be implemented.




















3) Click on edit mail settings and enter in the recipient email address. This only has to be done once as it is the same for all notifications.














If you want to send the notifications to multiple addresses, just put in a comma between each address.

4) Unplug your emonbase!! and check your email:














Behind the scenes


Main scripts:

notify_model.php
mail_model.php
notify_controller.php
notify_view.php



Installation/Setup
1) To use the notifier on your own server you will need php mail installed, to do this on ubuntu enter the following into terminal

sudo apt-get install php-pear
sudo pear install mail
sudo pear install Net_SMTP
sudo pear install Auth_SASL
sudo pear install mail_mime


2) In emoncms3/Includes copy the default.mail_settings.php file and rename too mail_settings.php and enter in your mail server settings.

3) Open the file cron.php and change the key password to something unique, this is used to ensure that only you can run the cron.php script.

4) Create a cronjob, in ubuntu start by opening crontab: $ crontab -e
Then add a cronjob that calls the cron.php script including the key that you created. To call the cron.php script once a minute try the following:


# m h  dom mon dow   command
* * * * * wget -q -O /dev/null "http://localhost/emoncms3/cron.php?key=YOURKEY


5) If your using the same database as a previous emoncms version, you will need to create the new notify database tables. This can be done in index.php by pasting require "Includes/setup.php"; in the top. Its probably worth removing it afterwards.

6) Configure your feeds as in the screens above!

New emoncms features part 1: blue message bar

Spent a bit of time implementing new features for emoncms today, the first one was a much needed but quite small addition: a themed location to output messages such as "user already exists" and so on, see the blue bar in the screen below:



Try it out here: http://vis.openenergymonitor.org/emoncms3/

How it works

If you have a look at the user_controller here github user_controller.php
On line 28 and 29 you will see the following:

$output['content'] = "";
$output['message'] = "";
(ie line 65) $output['message'] = "Your new account has been created";

The returned output from the controllers used to be just the one variable $output now we have two, one for main body content output and the other for message bar output. These variables are passed through index.php to the theme The theme then places the message and content in separately themed locations.

Community Energy Plan maker

Over the last year Glyn Hudson, Bethan Gritten and I have been running a community energy project with our local sustainability group Ecobro in the Penrhyndeudraeth area of North Wales. The aim of the project is to create a comprehensive snapshot of our current energy use as a group that we can then use as a solid foundation for creating a sustainable energy action plan.

As part of the project we have installed 20 openenergymonitor energy monitors and have also developed for the project a community energy auditing and plan making application which is what this blog post is about.

This is how the application works:

1) Fill out a single household energy audit, compare how your energy picture compares to the average UK household energy use and how it relates to the Centre for Alternative Technology Zero Carbon Britain 2030 energy scenario:


2) Aggregate data from each household to create a group view:


3) Explore how group scenario is built up of individual households contribution:


4) Explore future energy scenarios, see the effect of switching to electric cars, heatpumps etc on real household data from your group:


5) In the next version, see effect of energy efficiency measures, insulation, draft-proofing and see the cost and payback details of scenarios including a comparison of different measures by sustainable energy % increase impact per £.

The idea is that through this process we can help bring focus to areas and solutions that can have most impact and also give a tangible reference of progress so that milestones can be celebrated when achieved.

The application is largely inspired by David Mackay's book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (free to read online) as you can see from the use of the energy stacks. The aim is also very much about creating a tool that helps to create sustainable energy plans that add up and in the spirit of openenergymonitor and David Mackay's book the application is open source.

Download the source from github: https://github.com/openenergymonitor/CommunityEnergyPlanMaker

Try it out:
http://vis.openenergymonitor.org/cepm/

If you would like to help with development that would be great, please get in contact / send us github pull requests. If your doing a community energy plan making project and would like to use this tool, please do and let us know how your using it. 

University campus energy monitoring in France

Hello, my name is Baptiste Gaultier. When I started working on the project of monitoring the energy consumption of Telecom Bretagne (an engineering school in Brittany, France), I was looking for products which can measure, store, and track the energy consumption data of a typical university campus.

After spending some time researching the available solutions, I found a lot of expensive proprietary products and a project you may have heard of, called openenergymonitor. This project provides a very powerful, web-connected energy monitoring system, and the best part is that it is open-source !

I started to work on top of emonTx and emoncms and here are some new features I added to emoncms (the new hardware features will be addressed in a future blog post)  :
  • Map widget : allows you to see a map with all the sensors used for energy monitoring
  • Device manager : provides an easy way to add devices on the map widget
  • Node information widget : allows you to see all information (hostname, IP addresses, device type, power measured...) of a monitoring node

Screenshots

Dashboard with my university campus map



Device manager tab


We have made some progress, but we have still a lot of work to do before our goals are met, most notably:
  • Tagging and renaming the devices
  • Displaying the energy chart when clicking on a node
  • Drag and drop node positioning on a map (device manager)
  • Node filtering (depending on power consumption for instance)
  • How to use the map widget (documentation) 
The code has been released on github (I forked couple of days ago) : https://github.com/bgaultier/emoncms3/tree/devicemanager

The entire team working on the project at Telecom Bretagne is convinced of the great quality of the openenergymonitor project and we hope our work may be useful in any way.

Cheers !