Has anyone been able to pull from PGEs API or use their system to get the current power usage?
from mesamunefire@lemmy.world to programming@programming.dev on 22 Dec 00:14
https://lemmy.world/post/23401463
from mesamunefire@lemmy.world to programming@programming.dev on 22 Dec 00:14
https://lemmy.world/post/23401463
I created a solution…with a pi 4 but it just doesn’t seem to work very well. OCR is very finicky and while I was able to get pytesseract to pull the images off of a webcam, the numbers that get returned are very wrong. It looks like they only allow businesses to pull the powermeter data if I am reading this right: www.pge.com/en/…/smartmeter.html
My rate has increased 6 times this year, so power is very expensive here: 50c per KWH…on the lowest consumption rate. I need to figure out how to cut back or get solar panels. But I want to see in near real time how much energy we are using.
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the easyocr version somewhat works…but still having issues when its actually outside. Thought I would ask if anyone has figured out this issue before. Ill keep hacking away at it, but thought I would ask if the API is viable.
Don’t know about PGE’s API, but for the OCR stuff, you may get better results with additional preprocessing before you pass images into tesseract. e.g. crop it to just the region of interest, and try various image processing techniques to make the text pop out better if needed. You can also run tesseract specifically telling it you’re looking at a single line of data, which can give better results. (e.g.
–psm 7
for the command line tool) OCR is indeed finicky…Ill try it out. I put psm 11 at one point, but got 000000 back out unless my camera was just in the perfect spot. Then i would get around 1/2 the numbers right.
I suspect that PG&E’s smart meters might: 1) support an infrared pulse through an LED on the top of the meter, and 2) use a fairly-open protocol for uploading their meter data to the utility, which can be picked up using a Software Defined Radio (SDR).
Open Energy Monitor has a write-up about using the pulse output, where each pulse means a quantity of energy was delivered (eg 1 Watt-hour). So counting 1000 of such pulses would be 1 kWh, and that would be a way to track your energy consumption for any timescale.
What it won’t do is provide instantaneous power (ie kW drawn at this very moment) because the energy must accumulate to the threshold before sending a pulse. For example, a 9 Watt LED bulb that is powered on would only cause a new pulse every 6.7 minutes. But for larger loads, the indication would be very quick; a 5000 W dryer would emit a new pulse after no more than 0.72 seconds.
The other option is decoding the wireless protocol, which people have done using FOSS software. An RTL-SDR receiver is not very expensive, is very popular, and can also be used for other purposes besides monitoring the electric meter. Insofar as USA law is concerned, unencrypted transmissions are fair game to receive and decode. This method also has a wealth of other useful info in the data stream, such as instantaneous wattage in addition to the counter registers.