Danny Tsang » energy@home

Energy@Home 0.7 Released

Danny — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:37:01 +0000

This new release with the main focus on multichannel support. There were a lot of paint along the way most noticeable performance issues.

The multichannel support allows for 2 or 3 phase CT clamp compatibility. Channels are different from appliances. One CC128 device can have multiple appliances. Each appliance (according to the XML spec) can have multiple channels. Each channel are captured individually and the channel label is only shown when there are more than one channel captured in the graph legend. This means that IAMs will not show the channel prefix because they can only capture one channel at a time.

The graph will display each channel like separate appliances. The changes made to the database meant the temperature data is also treated as if it was a channel and therefore reduced a lot of code specifically written for temperature data retrieval.

Other interesting changes include data filtering in the datalogger. There are now options to check the data acquired from the CurrentCost device to ensure data integrity such as garbled data or supurious data points. This still can be further improved to filter each channel but at the moment it allows for filtering of maximum appliance ID (default is 9 and is 0 based) to device name checking.

To upgrade from 0.6.5 there are a few database upgrade scripts attached to Issue 24

Download the new version at http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/downloads/list

Energy@Home 0.6.5 Released

Danny — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:40:00 +0000

This new release didn’t go as smoothly as planned and I had aimed to get 0.7 out the door but felt this release did not deserve the minor versioning increment so I thought I’d explain in this post.

I had acquired some Individual Appliance Monitors (IAM) which connect to the CurrentCost energy monitor. I had tried to design the software to cater for multiple channels but found that it did not work 100%. With no way of testing this was not a surprise. I had scheduled the 0.7 milestone release all for making Energy@Home work with multiple monitors but time went by so quickly I thought I’d get it to a good working state and release it so that other people can get their IAMs (or other monitors) working.

Whilst conceptually it seemed simple to add multiple monitors the code changes that went into it was fairly large. Most of the work went into the web front end to handle more than 2 data series. The database and data logger components were already geared up to accept the new channels. I guess the web GUI shows some of lack of web design experience.

The overlay function was dropped because of the response times and complexity in refactoring the code to work with and without the current energy data series. Also the data grid stopped showing the energy values but it stilled showed the date and time with the temperature. On raising a new issue in the Google Code issue tracker the page stopped loading which hampered my progress to update the issues.

In light of all the happenings above I decided to release it under 0.6 branch and work out the bugs for 0.7 release.

energy@home 0.6 Released

Danny — Wed, 18 May 2011 20:00:04 +0000

0.6 contains mainly web UI changes and includes:

New Data tab – Contains a table / grid of the graph data
Various bug fixes -See check in comments
Updated flot libraries to version 0.7
As a consequence to flot 0.7 JQuery and JQuery UI have been updated to 1.5.1 and 1.8.12
New loading counter under the graph to show how long it takes for an initial graph data request
Optimized flot libraries by using the minified versions of the library
Updated documentation around security and install
Removing graph series does not cause the graph to reload

To download the latest version go to the download page at Google code project.

Web Server Basic Authentication = Weak

Danny — Sun, 15 May 2011 10:40:11 +0000

I’d like to point out that I knew Basic Authentication in web servers were not bullet proof but in fact the total opposite (pointed out in the energy@home documents). This was hammered home when I was inspired to do some optimizations on the energy@home project but I was very interested in the initial load and AJAX requests by the Google I/O 2011: Using GWT and Eclipse to Build Great Mobile Web Apps. During that process I noticed the GET request headers include an “Authorization” field with what looked like a base64 string. Low and behold entering the text into a base64 decoder and out came my username and password.

Whilst I saw this running Firebug on my local machine, it makes it very easy for a man in the middle or a sniffer to capture the packet and easily get the header and therefore decode and see the username and password.

In the mean time I have implemented HTTPS on my own installation but this does not help the majority using the software. This does not solve the problem but it does elevate the security to (try) and hinder the sniffers and firesheep like attacks.

Base 64 Decoder
Firebug FireFox Addon

energy@home 0.5.2 Released

Danny — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 09:45:27 +0000

A minor release but fixes the issue where Apache was reporting an error due to a missing variable. The new version also contains more changes “under the hood” such as using JSON natively during GET operations (graph data) and clean up of directory structure.

My next intentions for energy@home include:

Move flot library from 0.6 to 0.7 (Already done but requires API changes)
Move to JQuery UI 1.8.11 (Already implemented in trunk)

The above will be another minor release because there are no new functions included.

http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/

energy@home 0.5 Released

Danny — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 01:04:19 +0000

I’m excited to say a new release of energy@home have been released!

The new version includes:

Offline data storage – If it was unable to save the data to the database it will save it file and later re-insert the data to be viewed online again.
Removed Twitter support due to change in authentication protocol.
Improved stability.

I’m hoping to bring back Twitter support once oAuth is supported and released in python-twitter but I may have to look for an alternative library if the project takes too long.

Offline storage is good but limited. I plan to enhance this to make it more robust in future releases.

More general tweaks and fixes as I go along.

Grab a copy at http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/

Graph Annotation And Settings Features

Danny — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:01:58 +0000

Mark’s use of energy@home highlights a need for annotation function but before getting to that stage I want to customize the way historical data is retrieved.

Currently it only shows pre-set number of settings but I face a UI challenge to make it simple to use yet powerful enough to allow multiple overlays and graph settings and types.

As a prototype I have removed the pre-set intervals and replaced it with a textbox and the unit entered in the textbox. Whilst this works well it does not full fill my desire to allow more than one overlay. Also there is no min or max range so someone can crash the browser if they enter a high value with loads of data point e.g 99 hours. Whilst Flot may cope with large sets of data, it makes the point hover very hard and the resolution looks really bad. The flip side to this effect is that the zoom feature gives more data points.

Watts Clever Fridge + Freezer Power Anomaly

144 Bug

Danny — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:25:38 +0000

I have been in contact with Mark on my energy@home project and found Mark’s website which led me to a disappointing discovery – bug in the CurrentCost device.

Whilst it has not affected me yet it is somewhat disconcerning that the bug has existed over 2 generation of a product and still remains unfixed by the manufacturer.

The bug happens when multiple sensors are connected and the watts go over 3kW on either 2nd or 3rd channel. Whilst I am only using one sensor currently I was hoping the IAM sensors due to be released by CurrentCost won’t be affected. The pessimist I am I somehow doubt it if I hooked it up to a 3kW+ appliance e.g kettle.

Fridge/Freezer Anomaly Explained (Probably)

energy@home 0.4

Danny — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 22:15:10 +0000

I have just published version 0.4 of energy@home. It includes Twitter integration and a new graph which shows how much energy was used for each hour of the day.

energy@home project page

energy@home Twitter Integration

Danny — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:01:06 +0000

A preview of my part time project energy@home with Twitter integration.

As you can see the value for total energy used is currently way off but it’s a preview of what’s to come.

There are two options: tweet hourly summary and daily summary. These can be turned on and off. I am using python-twitter library which does not use oauth authentication so the client description comes up as API which is not nice.

energy@home Project Update v0.4a

Danny — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:43:01 +0000

It’s been a while since I have mentioned the project energy@home I have been working on so I thought I’d share the latest picture of what it looks like.

I will soon be tagging and release a new version with the major difference form 0.3 is triggers. Triggers allows data only to be captured if certain conditions are met or exceeded. This saves saving data which has not changed much.

Next step is to get pre-triggering working where if a trigger condition is met then the data leading up to the trigger event gets logged and certain amount of data is stored after the trigger. This allows a user to view data leading up to the event, the event itself which caused the trigger and the leading data after the event.

Improvements to the UI is needed to. I would like the graph settings to be more customizable and get the data table to work so users can inspect the raw values for themselves.

Special thanks goes to Chris Noon for data acquisition techniques which lead me to using triggers.

energy@home project page

energy@home Mention On GNC#518

Danny — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:14:57 +0000

I sent in an Email to Todd on the Geek News Central Podcast and he kindly linked my project in his show notes which can be found here. You can hear the recording on episode 518 around 1 hour 13 minutes in.

Energy@Home Released On Google Code

Danny — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:40:16 +0000

I have formally uploaded and started using Google Code to host my energy monitor I’m using / developing.

It has been released under the GPL license so feel free to take a look at my messy code and leave some constructive criticism.

http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/