Power Monitoring with rtl-sdr

Inspired by a blog post, I decided to set up power monitoring for myself too. I however like the simple look of rrdtool so I am using that to store the data.

This uses rtlamr to process the radio broadcasts by the meter. I live in a less dense location than the blog author so only picked up three meters using the idm+ message. My meter included a serial number on its face that directly matched one of those three meters so it was very easy to get the right reading.

Running

Install rtl-sdr on the system that has the rtl-sdr device. Install rtlamr rrdtool and its Python bindings on the system that will do the processing. For me, I have it all on the same computer.

The power/rtl_tcp_cron script will run a tmux session with rtl_tcp in it. Use one of two scripts to get the data into the rrdtool database.

• The power/meter_reading.py script will use rtlamr's one-shot mode to connect and wait for a broadcast. I tried this for a while but had issues with rtl_tcp not working after some number of connections. This method works better if you need to use the rtl-sdr device for other things.
• The power/rtlamr_sample script maintains a single connection to rtl_tcp and writes each reading to a file. Use the power/meter_reading.py script with the --input option and that file to add the consumption amount from that reading to the database.

Finally, the power/graph_usage script will create four graphs:

• Today's usage.
• Yesterday's usage.
• This week's usage.
• This month's usage.
• Last month's usage (soon).

Each graph will contain the kWh consumed over that time period.