Efergy-SDR

Efergy-SDR uses a cheap RTL-SDR dongle and the power of the awesome rtl_433 tool to pickup power consumption/generation broadcasts from Efergy energy monitors and pushes this data to PVOutput and/or a Phant server.

After completing this setup, here's how everything will work:

• capture.py is started at every boot and in turn starts rtl_433
• The current value(Amps) of any messages recieved by rtl_433 matching the specified transmitter ID(s) will be saved in a file named ID_amplog.
• Every 5 minutes, post.py will calculate the average, maximum, and minimum values for each of the ID_amplog files, multiply them by the specified voltage in order to get power in Watts, and send the average to PVOutput and/or the average, max and min to a Phant server. post.py then clears the amp logs.

Efergy-SDR was designed and tested for Raspberry Pi, however it should be very portable - rtl_433 is C and Efergy-SDR is Python.

A note on Phant

Sparkfun shut down their implementation of Phant (data.sparkfun.com) and ceased development of the Phant platform at the end of 2017. You can still spin up your own Phant server following the directions at github.com/sparkfun/phant if you like, however you may need to tweak some things around to get it to run reliably (have a look at the archived issues for some pointers). Or you can just use efergy-sdr to push to PVOutput, which provides ample graphs and analysis for virtually all applications.

If you do decide to use Phant, you will need to create a stream with the fields average, min and max.

• Install
• Setup
  • capture.py
  • Auto start
    • systemd
    • screen
  • post.py

Install

curl -fsSL https://github.com/Tugzrida/efergy-sdr/raw/master/install.sh > /tmp/efergy-sdr-install;
echo "9cc1b9a06a2362e2a14deb93f96d931a8a2d28eb  /tmp/efergy-sdr-install" | sha1sum -c - && bash /tmp/efergy-sdr-install;

(as always please read the contents of one-liner install scripts before running them as they have full access to your entire system)

Setup

Connect an RTL-SDR and run rtl_433 -R 36 -f 433485000. Take note of the ID reported for the efergy transmitter(s) you wish to use. If you want to log more than one transmitter, or there is more than one within range, pressing the button on the front of the efergy unit briefly to start learning mode will show Learning: YES in packets received from that transmitter for a few minutes.

---

capture.py

Open ~/efergy-sdr/capture.py and edit the transmitter list at the beginning of the file to specify the ID(s) from the previous step.

You can specify multiple transmitters as follows:

txs = {
    "123": {"name": "House usage"},
    "456": {"name": "1.68kW solar"},
    ...
    "789": {"name": "12.16kW solar"}
}

The name field is only used for IFTTT low battery notificaions, which can be optionally setup as follows:

1. Create an applet on IFTTT with a webhook called notify as "this" and a notification with body {{Value1}} as "that".
2. Take your webhooks key from https://ifttt.com/maker_webhooks> Documentation and insert it into capture.py in place of YOUR_KEY near the end of the script.

---

Auto start

systemd

capture.py can be started on boot with systemd. If you don't have systemd then you could use the screen setup below, but it's not ideal.

Firstly, copy efergy-sdr.service to the proper location. Something like this:

sudo cp ~/efergy-sdr/efergy-sdr.service /etc/systemd/system/

Then set permissions:

sudo chown root:root /etc/systemd/system/efergy-sdr.service
sudo chmod 644 /etc/systemd/system/efergy-sdr.service

If you're not using a Pi then you'll need to edit /etc/systemd/system/efergy-sdr.service(with root privileges) and just change the path of ExecStart to point to capture.py where this repo is cloned.

The service can then be enabled to run on boot as follows:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable efergy-sdr

And finally started with:

sudo systemctl start efergy-sdr

screen

Doing things this way is not great as it won't restart on crash. Use systemd or another service manager if at all possible.

First install screen with sudo apt install screen

Then open /etc/rc.local (you'll need root access) and add

screen -h 1024 -dmS "efergy-sdr" /home/pi/efergy-sdr/capture.py

before the line containing exit 0. You'll need to substitute in your username to make the path point to capture.py where this repo is cloned.

This will start capture.py at every boot in a screen session.

---

post.py

Open ~/efergy-sdr/post.py and specify the ID(s) similar to before. You'll also need to add the AC voltage the transmitter is monitoring. You can also add PVOutput and/or Phant keys to the transmitter entries for data to be logged. (If you don't add any keys, then post.py will simply clear the ID_amplog files and nothing else, which is pretty boring :( )

txs = [
    {"id": "123", "voltage": 240, "pvo_apikey": "super_secret_numbers", "pvo_sysid": "12345", "generation": False, "phant_public": "itsasecret", "phant_private": "shhhhhh"},
    {"id": "456", "voltage": 240, "pvo_apikey": "very_secret_numbers", "pvo_sysid": "67890", "generation": False, "phant_public": "donttellanyone", "phant_private": "my_dogs_name"},
    ...
    {"id": "789", "voltage": 120, "pvo_apikey": "numbers_numbers_numbers", "pvo_sysid": "54321", "generation": True, "phant_public": "verysecret", "phant_private": "secretsauce"}
]

It's important to set "generation" correctly. Set to False, the concerned efergy transmitter will log to usage on PVOutput. Setting to True will log data from the transmitter as generation.

Transmitters with "generation" set to True will also have their outputs rounded down to 0 when their maximum value over 5 minutes is less than 20 Watts. This is to prevent the logging of night time back-draw of inverters. This value will most likely need tweaking as per your inverter and setup.

Run crontab -e and add the following line to the end:

*/5 * * * * /home/pi/efergy-sdr/post.py

Once again, you'll need to substitute in your username to make the path point to capture.py where this repo is cloned.

This will run post.py every 5 minutes.