Smart electricity meters communicate metrics with the DSMR protocol. To read that data this solution uses Telegraf and DSMR Parser via USB. There are probably more efficient solutions but for this solutions I wasn't up to make my own complete solution and wanted to use existing things.
This project is a part of my solution and focusses on reading data. I use InfluxDB but since Telegraf is flexible with output plugins you can change this to any solution.
Main components:
- Telegraf: The Swiss army knife for metrics. Lots of plug-ins for data collection and writing with out of the box resilience for errors/unavailability of any components
- DSMR Parser: reads DMSR protocol over USB and translates this into readible information
- Docker: To bundle Telegraf en DSMR
- P1 USB Cable: search
Required software:
- Docker - everything is packaged into one container
Reading is done from dsmr.py. This uses the DSMR Parser library and reads a number of fields from the DSRM message and writes them as InfluxDB Line Protocol to standard out. This script is copied with dependencies into the Docker container.
The input is the P1 USB Cable device.
To adjust the script see the DSMR Parser documentation. DSMR Parser is pinned at version 0.33 as this was the available version during development.
Installation and running InfluxDB is left out of this project. Pick any output plugin Telegraf has that suite your needs.
In case Influx is your choice, please refer to the InfluxDB website for this. After installation create a bucket to store the data. Also create a token to use in the Telegraf configuration as authentication.
For reading data telegraf is configured using the default file /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf. This file contains the input plugin configuration.
The output is defined using the configuration directory option where separate .conf files can be placed. By default the collected input is written to stdout. To write to InfluxDB create your own file based on output_influxdb.conf.sample and set the configuration as host and bucket for the InfluxDB target.
To run the solution first build the image with make image. The image grows quite large in file containing botht Telegraf and Python. Still the size is almost equal to the original Telegraf images that don't contain Python.
To run the image execute
docker run -d --device=/dev/ttyUSB0 \
--name=smart_meter \
-v "${PWD}/telegraf.d:/etc/telegraf.d:ro" \
cwesdorp/smart_meter_telegraf:latest
Update the configuration files in telegraf.d or provide your own folder to overwrite the output.
There are several other solutions to connect to the P1 port of a meter and also facilitate storage and display. There are several vendors of USB cables, just search. Some project I found (but didn't try) to read DSMR are
Another solution can be P1 dongles that either can be read locally or submit data directly to the internet.