We know there's a Raspberry Pi 4B inside the emonPi2 box but how has it been made into an energy monitor?
They are connected through the GPIO header and when opening the box they look like this:
(I don't know about you, but I found this incredibly beautiful)
I've spent a couple mornings reading about the EmonPi2 and I still have loads of questions and things to learn. Apparently, it can also work without the RaspberryPi, so there're a few things that have a default configuration and a secondary configuration in the absence of a Raspberry Pi.
Here's a few high level areas I have identified of the EmonPi2:
The only one relevant parts for our energy monitoring use case are the Current Sensors and Voltage measuring stuff as they are crucial for Power measurement (P=V*I).
Once we have voltage and current, the rest would be going to the Raspberry PI through the GPIO and arrive at EmonCMS running on the Raspberry Pi server.
Once in the Raspberry Pi, I can explore the software running in it and circle back to the hardware, hopefully covering some areas and answering some questions I now have about how everything comes together.
Timeline of Open Energy Monitor Devices:
Something I've found confusing is the amount of devices documented in Open Energy Monitor and how the latest available one was not listed in the Home Page of the documentation (I've tried raising a PR for that). To understand this better I've asked for a historical info, to which Trystan has kindly replied detailing blog posts and nuances I've used to create a visual timeline of devices that were designed or sold in partnerships through Open Energy Monitor.
Turns out that emonPi is more adecuate for residential purposes while emonTx is for larger buildings, which is why they're both evolved in parallel.
Turns out that emonPi is more adecuate for residential purposes while emonTx is for larger buildings, which is why they're both evolved in parallel.
