This personal project collects all kinds of utility related data and can be installed on a raspberry pi.

The main goal is to collect and visualize data from

• a green energy meter used in solar installations
• the Belgian digital electricity meter using the P1 port

In the future the idea is to expand the project bny integrating

• monitoring the water level in the rain water tank
• activate smart plugs based on the collected data to increase self usage of solar generated electricity

The project is build to run on a Raspberry pi and consists of 3 parts. The different parts are kept seperated on purpose to make the application easily extendable.

Plain python scripts that collect data from various inputs and store it in the database

A few plain PHP scripts that read data from the database, process them and return them through an API

A web page that displays a variety of graphs and data insights based on the API calls

You will need a raspberry pi with apache, php, mysql, python and git installed on it.

• Pull the repo anywhere you want, ex your home dir
• remove the _ from scripts/database_.py and htdocs/api/config/Database_.php and fill out your DB credentials
• create a synlink for the web project and python scripts

ln -s /home/pi/utility-insights/htdocs /var/www/htdocs
ln -s /home/pi/utility-insights/scripts /home/pi/scripts

• setup the cron tab

@reboot sleep 5 && python3 /home/pi/scripts/read_electricity_meter.py > /home/pi/scripts/log/read_electricity_meter.log 2>&1
@reboot sleep 5 && python3 /home/pi/scripts/read_green_energy_meter.py > /home/pi/scripts/log/read_green_energy_meter.log 2>&1

• if you want, allow the application to self update by changing the repos directory user sudo chown -R www-data:www-data utility-insights/ . If you want to change it back again, run sudo chown -R {username}:{username} utility-insights/.