vees/em100b-rtl-meter

Power Meter live display proof of concept

This project is a proof of concept to connect a home power meter to a live display on the web.

The data source is a GE I-210+c ANSI Single Phase Meter. Any time 1.0 watt hours of energy passes through the meter it sends a pulse of infrared light out from an emitter on the front. This pulse is received by a Black and Decker EM100B Power Monitor attached to the outside of the meter. Every 30 seconds the EM100B transmits a data packet on 433.92 MHz reporting the interval in milliseconds between the last two pulses it received.

This signal is received by an inexpensive EzTV 645 DVT-B SDR receiver with a Fitipower FC0013 chip and decoded by the rtl_433 generic data receiver software. The rtl_433 decodes each packet using a recent patch and immediately passes it to a mosquitto_pub client to send to the public MQTT server/broker at test.mosquitto.org.

When a web browser loads this page, it contacts the MQTT server and subscribes to the specific topic using a websocket. This listener stays open as long as the page is open, and any time a new message is received the current power level on the indicator is updated. This is powered by a combination of mqtt and react-d3-speedometer and designed using ReactJS to a static build.

In this way it is as close to a real time information display as can be done for free.

Repository is at https://github.com/vees/em100b-rtl-meter

Setup Instructions

rtl_433 version

Minimum build for rtl_433 is revision a20cd1a that contains jbrzozoski pull request for "Blueline PowerCost Monitor" support. This code will probably not be in a formal release for a few months so it needs to built from code that includes the devices/blueline.c code.

Follow the instructions for priming the meter from the comments:

1) Start rtl_433
2) Tap the button or power cycle the monitor
3) Look for the rtl_433 output indicating the BlueLine monitor ID and note the ID field
4) Stop rtl_433
5) Restart rtl_433, explicitly passing the ID as a parameter to this decoder

For example, if you see the ID 45364 in step 3, you would start the decoder with a command like:
rtl_433 -R 176:45364

rtl_433.conf

Rather than stack a bunch of command line options, add specfic config options that include the 176 protocol and monitor ID.

output json
protocol 176:45364
report_meta level
report_meta time:unix
report_meta protocol

rtl_443 to mosquitto_pub

The channel and server need to match the one in App.js but otherwise are arbitrary.

$ ./rtl_433 | mosquitto_pub -h test.mosquitto.org -t home/rtl_433 -l
rtl_433 version 20.11-8-g8773ec4d branch blueline at 202012201933 inputs file rtl_tcp RTL-SDR SoapySDR
Use -h for usage help and see https://triq.org/ for documentation.
Trying conf file at "rtl_433.conf"...
Reading conf from "rtl_433.conf".
Registered 1 out of 176 device decoding protocols [ ]
Detached kernel driver
Found Fitipower FC0013 tuner
Exact sample rate is: 250000.000414 Hz
Sample rate set to 250000 S/s.
Tuner gain set to Auto.
Tuned to 433.920MHz.
Allocating 15 zero-copy buffers