PowerCounter

Python based application to analyze the data of a electricity meter sent over an infrared LED using an USB UART adapter. The extracted data is sent via MQTT.

Hardware Interface

The hardware interface consists of a USB to TTL adapter using a CP2102, an SFH 309FA-4 infrared photo transistor and a 1.5kOhm resistor:

                +----------------+--5V-->
USB Port <----> | CP2102 Adapter |--RxD->
                +----------------+--GND->

  5V----+
        |
       ---
       | | 1.5kOhm
       ---
        |
  RxD---+
        |
      |/   SFH 309FA-4
      |\
        |
  GND---+

Installation

powercounter is distributed as a single executable packaged using pyInstaller. So all you have to do is to download the latest executable and copy it to a location of your choice, for example /usr/local/bin:

wget https://github.com/seeraven/powercounter/releases/download/v1.0.0/powercounter_Ubuntu18.04_amd64
chmod +x powercounter_Ubuntu18.04_amd64
sudo mv powercounter_Ubuntu18.04_amd64 /usr/local/bin/powercounter

You can also create a docker image and use it to run the powercounter. To create it, clone this repository (and all submodules) and call:

make build-docker

Then you can start the docker container:

docker run -d --restart=always --name=powercounter -v /dev:/dev -v /run/udev:/run/udev:ro --device-cgroup-rule='c 188:* rmw' powercounter:1.0.0 publish

Debugging the Protocol

For debugging the raw protocol sent over the serial line, you can first capture a data file by calling:

powercounter capture raw_data.dat

And then analyse it by using it as an input file:

powercounter -i raw_data.dat print

Developing

If you want to modify the code, you have to clone the repository and initialize all submodules:

git clone https://github.com/seeraven/powercounter
git submodule update --init

The main interface for all targets (formatting, checking and building the releases) is using the make4py infrastructure. To get a first help on the available options call:

make help