OpenEnergyMonitor

Using KST for graphing

In the last year of my physics degree I did some work for the physics department developing a sun tracking sensor for a balloon based telescope. I got to use a great piece of free and open source graphing software called KST. Its a program designed specificely for plotting large amounts of scientific data. From the KST website:

"Kst is the fastest real-time large-dataset viewing and plotting tool available and has basic data analysis functionality. Kst contains many powerful built-in features and is expandable with plugins and extensions. Extensive help is available, both from within kst and on the web. Kst is a KDE application and is freely available for anyone to download and use."

Its a great program to use to plot energy monitor data. Here's an example of data being plotted from the non-invaive current trasformer method:

How to install on Ubuntu

In a terminal window type: $ sudo apt-get install kst


On windows

If your a windows user kst can be downloaded here: http://kst.kde.org/download.html

How to start graphing

1. First you will need ArduinoComm which is detailed here.
2. Run the program with $ java Program >tmp.dat. The addition of >tmp.dat at the end of the run command line writes the data outputed by the java program to a file for storage.
3. Run KST by typing $ kst
4. Once KST is open click the magic wand button: the data wizard.
5. Find your tmp.dat file and click next
6. Move all available data Fields to the selected data field box by clicking the right arrow.
7. Click on the 'Next' button.. and again...and then 'Finish'
8. You should now see several graphs are in the above picture and they should be updating in real time!

Pictures and Screenshots

Here's screenshot of a typical output with two lamps and a laptop connected using the mains AC non-invasive method (click to enlarge):

36 hours of whole house electricity use monitoring:

the above zoomed in a bit over a few hours.