Visualisations - getting more than the basics

I have EmonCMS set up and running for the last few months, happily logging the temperature in my solar hot water tank every 3 minutes.  I have a couple of multigraphs set up which show me the temperature changes throughout the day.  This much is good and is working.

I recently added in pulse monitoring using interrupts on an Arduino on 9 electricity circuits - light upstairs, sockets, upstairs, lights downstairs, sockets, downstairs, lights kitchen, sockets kitchen, lights utility, sockets utility & oven.  The feeds are updated every 60s.

There are 2000 pulses per kWh, so (as I understand it) each pulse equals 1/2 Wh.  I don't do any computing on the Arduino other than incrementing a counter for each circuit every time a pulse is received for that circuit.

This count is enough to show me the usage over time as you can see in the attached image.  My problem is how to move from this to some of the more advanced visualistaions that I see in various posts and use things like "My Electric".  It seems that almost every other sort of visualisation I look at isn't available from my data or needs a different sort of input.

Is there a visualisations manual available?

Or . . . given an input where "2000" = 1kWh . . . how would you go about visualising that other than the basic multigraphs I'm using?

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

z

BraileTrail's picture

Re: Visualisations - getting more than the basics

Hi Zag, Can't help with your question, but I would be very interested to know what you are using to monitor the individual circuits with. What is generating the pulses? Thanks, BraileTrail

Keen2bGreen's picture

Re: Visualisations - getting more than the basics

I've been playing with d3 javascript, using the EmonCMS API.  It looks promising, but with the lack of info on the API its difficult to progress too much.  

It seems the API only returns a maximum of 1000 values, and changes the resolution of the feeds based on the time frame you request.  Its not that obvious to me the logic behind what it decides to return.

As it is a very dynamic charting/viz toolset, I thought you could have a look at my early example - which shows a realtime feed, plus a historical view (date and time selection) with zoom feature.

I'm no pro coder, and this its very much a work in progress.  Try and have a look here: http://www.lewisworld.co.uk/d3energy/index.html.en

Most of what I have acheived is through cutting and pasting from the examples available here:http://nvd3.org/

Hopefully it doesn't get bombarded with hits and shuts my EmonCMS down!

I'm keen to collaborate with others on this approach.  Please let me know if you share an interest in developing this further.

Mike

zag's picture

Re: Visualisations - getting more than the basics

BraileTrail - we got little mini-meters ("inline DIN rail meters" is possibly a more accurate description) installed on each circuit on the distribution board.  They are similar to these ones - http://jdmetering.co.uk/imt80a-kwh-meter.html, but mine have digital displays.

So, as well as having "fuses"/circuit breakers for each part of the circuit, we also have a meter on each circuit clocking up a pulse every 1/2000 kWh.  The electrical circuit for measuring the pulses is pretty simple.  I'm not an electrician or an engineer, so I'm not going to try to attempt to describe the pulse stuff other than to say every time it pulses the Arduino notices and increments a counter.  Then every minute the Arduino contacts my EmonCMS and sends the count.

Mike - I'm all for improving the graphing, but I'm afraid I'm sufficiently non-technical that there were more words that I didn't understand than that I did understand on the nvd3 page.  I'm not totally non-technical, so I understood what they were getting at, so I'll have a think and see if I can get my head around it.

z

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