On 14/11/11 11:23:31, Mark Rogers wrote:
I'd like to play with one of the various energy monitoring gadgets that seem to be everywhere these days. I'm looking for one that will transfer data to my PC, and obviously that PC is running Linux (Ubuntu 11.04 at the moment, not sure if it will go to 11.10 yet...)
Any suggestions/recommendations?
I'm as lazy as they come so ideally I'm looking for something that can be permanently connected to my PC (therefore presumably a wireless connection will be involved at some point); I don't really want a box that collects data that I then take to my PC to download it once a week/ month/year/never. And I'm also looking for access to the raw data, but also suggestions for suitable GUIs welcome too.
I've had a CurrentCost meter for some years now which I believe is called the Classic. It does have a USB lead and is connected to my computer (Debian Testing). Soon after I aquired it I found some software which saved data into a database and provided graphing facilities.
http://code.google.com/p/currentcostgui/
Unfortunately the Live data part of it doesn't work under Linux. It crashes usually before it's plotted anything and a number of other users have reported the same problem. The developer suggested it was a problem with one of the linux libraries but he has stopped developing/supporting it now anyway. I don't understand Python so haven't been able to do anything about it.
Just today I managed to find enough information to enable me to cobble something together using Perl and rrdtool to produce a graph to show our live data usage. We have a two phase supply which complicates things a little but I have been able to plot both phases (different lines) on the same graph.