Raspberry Pi Zero Smart Energy Meter

The plan for this project is to take my ageing Smart Energy meter that I got given free about 10 years ago, connecting it up to the very low-cost Raspberry Pi via a serial to USB interface, then using some Python scripts to 'webify' it and send the data to the home server to make graphs and stuff.

Not the world's most complex of hardware hacks as it just involves plugging things together but for a first dip back into the world of that kind of thing, I think it's enough.

Project overview:

Objectives: Getting the electricity usage data into a MySQL database on the server so that I can analyse it and build nice graphs and stuff and things.

Challenges: Parsing the stream of XML data, then firing it to the server using some kind of API endpoint (that I have to write)

Progress:


01/05/2016

• Pi Zero ordered!

05/05/2016

• Pi Zero delivered!

09/05/2016 - 18:20

• I just successfully booted the Pi Zero, connected to the old USB hub. Not a major milestone, but a very important one.

It didn't explode! Yay! 

August 2016

• We moved house and the Smart Energy meter has gone missing - it's in a box somewhere

September 2017

• Still no further progress but I'm posting this project as it stands in an effort to kick me into actually making progress.  Hopefully there will be an update soon! 

Samsung Galaxy S3 Sensor Data

Recently I was fiddling around with a program on my S3 called Sensor Dump which just dumps the raw data from the various sensors onto the screen, and/or saves them into a CSV file.

Looking at the mag-field data on a graph is pretty interesting. This is where I passed my phone over the top of a laptop power supply.

It occurs to me that you could overlay this data on a camera display and do some kind of really low-resolution magnetic field camera thingie.

Hmm.   I wonder how directional it is.

Further tests required.