Humm Energy Monitor Set Up – Part 3 – Data

My Humm Energy monitor is now fully set up.  It's been churning away gently admonishing me for going over my kWh allowance for the day.

As I mentioned in the unboxing - there's an integrated 2GB SD card for the Duet to record the energy usage.  As the trial progresses, I should be able to upload the data to the website for them to analyse.  They faithfully promise to send me a spreadsheet of the data if I want it.

Well, what kind of geek would I be if I didn't have a tinker with it my self :-)

I was expecting the files for each day to be rather large - they're only about 50KiB per day. So a 2GB card is good for about 40,000 days - or a little over a century. Guess I won't have to worry about making room on the card.

Each file is named with a datestamp, so my first was GEO90914.DAT.

I was sort of expecting it to be compressed, encrypted, munged and otherwise impenetrable.

It was CSV.

14/Sep/2009 20:00,GMU1   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,GMU2   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,GMU3   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,BSU    ,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,0
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU1   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU2   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU3   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU4   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU5   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:00,SAU6   ,00000.000,0,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:30,GMU1   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:30,GMU2   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:30,GMU3   ,00000.000,1,09.68
14/Sep/2009 20:30,BSU    ,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,00000000,0
14/Sep/2009 20:30,SAU1   ,00000.000,2,09.68
...

Oh happy day! I'm guessing that GMU1,2,3 refer to the "plug bugs" - the electricity sensors - not sure yet what the others are, but I'm sure I'll figure it out soon.

Having all the data in CSV makes it really easy to whack into a spreadsheet or on to a webserver to do some nice data visualisations. Good job, Humm!

However, it's a bit of a pain walking from one room to another with an SD card. It also means that my visualisations will be out of date until I manually update them. If only there were a way to automate the process...

So, I'm now looking at something like Eye-Fi. The Eye-Fi is an SD card with built in WiFi. It's supposed to be used for instantly uploading pictures from a digital camera - but I see no reason why it shouldn't be made to upload the .DAT files the duet creates.

We'll have to see...