Rainforest Eagle Energy Monitor Plugin?

[automateme]

I installed a Rainforest Eagle SmartMeter Gateway energy monitor and it is a great little device. Unfortunately, a plugin for Homeseer does not exist.

http://rainforestautomation.com/rfa-z109-eagle/

http://www.amazon.com/Rainforest-EAG...inforest+eagle


The unit does not require a connection (CT Clamps, etc.) to the power service coming into the house, but instead pulls data directly off of your Smart Meter. It can also pull your current $/kWh billing rate from the meter if your utility supports it (mine does not appear to at this time). It supports "From Grid" and "To Grid" if you are doing solar generation. It communicates with the Smart Meter using Zigbee, and connects to your network over Ethernet. The Eagle is fully supported and approved by many Utility providers, and since it communicates directly with your power meter, it requires authorization from your Utility provider. SCE is my provider, and all I did was login to my account page, go to the device management tab and register the device with the MAC address and ID number. Took all of about 5 minutes. You can check here to see if your utility provider supports the Eagle.

http://rainforestautomation.com/supported-utilities/

There also seems to be a mature API available.

http://rainforestautomation.com/wp-c...ST_API-1.1.pdf

http://rainforestautomation.com/developer/


It would be great to have a plug-in that could read values from the Eagle into HS3 devices and populate the HS3 Energy Database. Are there any developers that are interested in creating this plug-in?

I had suggested in another forum that if there were enough of us interested in using this device in their Homeseer environment, maybe we could each chip in a few bucks and buy one for the developer that takes on the project. In any case, if anyone wants to know more about the device, post in this thread and I will try and answer any questions that I can.

[DSteiNeuro]

Just ordered mine from Amazon.
Seems perfect for a plugin!

Order placed- will arrive tomorrow

[spud]

I would be interested to buy one and create a plugin, unfortunately it doesn't work with my utility (Hydro-Quebec)

http://rainforestautomation.com/supp...ian-utilities/
"They have the capability to connect devices to the meters but no plans announced to date"

If that change in a near future I will definitely build a plugin.

[automateme]

I would be interested to buy one and create a plugin, unfortunately it doesn't work with my utility (Hydro-Quebec)

http://rainforestautomation.com/supp...ian-utilities/
"They have the capability to connect devices to the meters but no plans announced to date"

If that change in a near future I will definitely build a plugin.

Thanks Spud! I hope that your utility provides support soon. I'm sure that our utilities here see it as a cost savings. They don't need to have a human walk up to every meter to visually get a current reading. They just needed to flip the switch to allow the customer to grab their data as well.

Let me know if there is anything that you ever want me to try since I have one installed here.

[Daweeze]

I would be interested to buy one and create a plugin, unfortunately it doesn't work with my utility (Hydro-Quebec).....

If that change in a near future I will definitely build a plugin.

Tease!

-Travis

[DSteiNeuro]

Move

[jlrichar]

I would be interested to buy one and create a plugin, unfortunately it doesn't work with my utility (Hydro-Quebec)

http://rainforestautomation.com/supp...ian-utilities/
"They have the capability to connect devices to the meters but no plans announced to date"

If that change in a near future I will definitely build a plugin.

Could you write a plugin by accessing someone's device and data remotely via a VPN? Just a thought.

[automateme]

Could you write a plugin by accessing someone's device and data remotely via a VPN? Just a thought.

If Spud wanted to take a run at it, I could probably setup access to my unit.

[DSteiNeuro]

Arrived last night, Amazon overnight drop ship from Rainforest.
I put in a request to SDG&E last night and was linked by this morning.

Works great!
This will make an awesome plugin. I think with some logic, you could trigger events based on power consumption changes.

If Spud or other developers are interested, it would be easy enough to share our data via the Rainforest web portal.

DSteiNeuro

[JonTex]

I happen to be googleing this today and came across your post and thought I'd share what I did to integrate my rainforest with homeseer. It works for what you describe, events/alerts for usage thresholds, etc. I essentially have a device in my homeseer list that shows my instantaneous power consumption and have another device that has total (lifetime) kWh usage. I could also have a third for power fed to the grid if I had solar, but I don't.

This is what I did...

1. Installed the HomeSeer Rest API (http://forums.homeseer.com/showthrea...hlight=RESTful)
This gives me an easy way to control devices and for RainForest to update the usage.

2. Create new devices in homeseer. From the home screen, click Add Device. Remove the default on/off values and add a range value. I defined mine as Start 0 End 30, as I never expect to use more than 30 kWh, check include values, Suffix=kWh, and 3 decimal places. Set it as a status indicator. For the total usage, I defined a range of 0 - 1000000, no decimals. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to turn off the On/Off buttons that are shown on the device on the main screen, but they don't do anything.

3. Attached is a python script I found and customized for my use. Open the script and look for MYSERVERNAME. This is the web address of your homeseer server. Mine is on the same box as the python script, so I don't need to add username/password - but i think it probably could with http://user: pass@myservername. Modify the param1=xxx in the scripts URL to whatever the 'Reference ID' number is of the devices you created in step 2.

4. Look at the imports in the python script and install those with the python installer.

5. Create a job in task scheduler and have it call the script every few minutes with the follwoing parameters (windows): "python.exe meter_status.py -a 192.168.123.123"
---the ip address is that of my RainEagle

That's it! The script will read the values from your rain eagle and then update the value of the 'virtual' device in homeseer. Now you can make events against the change of that device's value.

Hope all that's clear!

[desolatax]

I happen to be googleing this today and came across your post and thought I'd share what I did to integrate my rainforest with homeseer. It works for what you describe, events/alerts for usage thresholds, etc. I essentially have a device in my homeseer list that shows my instantaneous power consumption and have another device that has total (lifetime) kWh usage. I could also have a third for power fed to the grid if I had solar, but I don't.

This is what I did...

1. Installed the HomeSeer Rest API (http://forums.homeseer.com/showthrea...hlight=RESTful)
This gives me an easy way to control devices and for RainForest to update the usage.

2. Create new devices in homeseer. From the home screen, click Add Device. Remove the default on/off values and add a range value. I defined mine as Start 0 End 30, as I never expect to use more than 30 kWh, check include values, Suffix=kWh, and 3 decimal places. Set it as a status indicator. For the total usage, I defined a range of 0 - 1000000, no decimals. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to turn off the On/Off buttons that are shown on the device on the main screen, but they don't do anything.

3. Attached is a python script I found and customized for my use. Open the script and look for MYSERVERNAME. This is the web address of your homeseer server. Mine is on the same box as the python script, so I don't need to add username/password - but i think it probably could with http://user: pass@myservername. Modify the param1=xxx in the scripts URL to whatever the 'Reference ID' number is of the devices you created in step 2.

4. Look at the imports in the python script and install those with the python installer.

5. Create a job in task scheduler and have it call the script every few minutes with the follwoing parameters (windows): "python.exe meter_status.py -a 192.168.123.123"
---the ip address is that of my RainEagle

That's it! The script will read the values from your rain eagle and then update the value of the 'virtual' device in homeseer. Now you can make events against the change of that device's value.

Hope all that's clear!

Awesome! Just set this up and it works well. Unfortunately it doesn't work if you have security mode enabled in the firmware and are submitting the data to the cloud, since it needs to authenticate against the device once that is enabled with the cloud id. Looks like it's a restriction of the RainEagle Python library though.

Were you able to feed it in to the energy graphs in Homeseer? That's the portion I'm trying to figure out right now.

[DSteiNeuro]

Look at the imports in the python script and install those with the python installer.

Awesome! I have newer used Python with HomeSeer so I don't understand the above. Do I need to install Python?

I think that you can get rid of the On/Off buttons by setting the device to "Status Only".

Thanks!

[desolatax]

Awesome! I have newer used Python with HomeSeer so I don't understand the above. Do I need to install Python?

I think that you can get rid of the On/Off buttons by setting the device to "Status Only".

Thanks!

Yeah, you'll need to install Python 2.7 and you can use pip to install the packages. I had to manually install RainEagle from the git repo.

I was able to get rid of the on/off buttons by hitting status only, but I still have the on/off power graphic there.

[jlrichar]

I wonder how many people would buy a plugin for this device? If it integrated with the HS energy db, and provided devices to act on energy changes it would be pretty useful.

[automateme]

I wonder how many people would buy a plugin for this device? If it integrated with the HS energy db, and provided devices to act on energy changes it would be pretty useful.

I would certainly pay for this plugin if it populated the HS energy database. Having the point-in-time energy utilization in a device that I could create events around would also be very useful.