Hello everyone,
I need some help in building an energy monitor using the open source method
In constructing and building, would I make use of the emonTx,emonGLCD and emoncms together or would I pick one out of them to use in this project.
And also are the sketches available online or would I need to come up with that myself?
Thank you very much
Re: Building an energy monitor
Hello Butterfly,
The easy one first: All the sketches you need are available, but you can of course customise them to suit your needs.
The hardware:
EmonTx is an energy monitor transmitter. Although it can output data to a computer via the serial port (the same one that you use for programming it), it is intended to be used to measure your energy and send the data via a wireless link to either an emonBase or an emonGLCD (or both).
The emonGLCD: this receives and displays the data. That's all.
The emonBase: this receives the data and launches it over an Ethernet connection to emonCMS (which you can either run on your own server - if you have one - or you can use emoncms.org).
So in short you really need both emonTx and emonGLCD in order to have a live display, and you need to add an emonBase if you want to record the data on a server somewhere for later analysis.
[Note: the new emonTx currently in development might have an Ethernet connection so won't need the emonBase as well].