[duanethorpe]

jj613,  I think the webcam is a great idea – relatively inexpensive and easy.

[duanethorpe]

waterboyz, Thanks for your nice comments. Getting into programming, even with something as user friendly as the Raspberry Pi, can be very time consuming. I certainly understand your reasoning in wanting a non-cloud based emporia. They make a great product for what it does and no one can beat or even match their price point. If they chose to offer a non-cloud version, I feel they would likewise do a great job and a great price. Nevertheless, I do not know their business model and long-term objectives.

As for another forum to meet, I do not know of a more appropriate place, but I’m ok if someone suggests one.   I’m not too concerned about emporia booting us off. There is a mutual benefit for them to hear what other folks want and what they are thinking. At least to me the important part is to not sell a competing product in their forum. I would think it would be ok to post hobby related designs or even discussions of pro/cons of other competitors. That is how I think, but alas, I admit I don’t make the rules here. I will say the one time I talked to a emporia person on the phone, he was very courteous and knowledgeable. The same for emporia posts here in the forum. So, if they ever consider our posts as “crossing the line”, I feel they will be courteous enough to give us a warning before booting us off.

[duanethorpe]

I posted this issue in the report a bug area of this forum on November 17, 2020:
community.emporiaenergy.com/topic/gen2-cannot-be-used-when-internet-is-down/         (note I removed hyperlinks since my attempt with them was deleted, so you will have to copy and paste into your browser).

Since emporia did not respond to my original post, I decided to “roll my own solution”. I am a retired Electrical Engineer so I have the time and tinkering with electronics/programming is a fun hobby. I have provided a link below to my GitHub page where you can see what I did. I do not intend for my solution to be in competition to the emporia units. I am not selling anything. My solution requires more time and labor to implement, but most important to me is it meets my requirements. And it is all local to my network, no cloud.

If you are wondering if the Raspberry Pi 3B+ is powerful enough for power measurements every 2 seconds, I will say definitely yes. It has been running for well over a month, never missing a beat. In fact I recently started sending air quality info from inside my house via an ESP32 microcontroller to the RPi. So I can even display that data also, no problem. That is the beauty of using popular hardware and software where there are lots of examples on the internet from folks who have done something similar to what you want. Anyway, best of luck to all of you.

github.com/DuaneOne/House-Electrical-Power-Usage-Monitor-Including-Generator          ( again sorry you will have to copy and paste into your browser).

• This reply was modified 3 years, 10 months ago by duanethorpe.

[duanethorpe]

waterboyz, Agree yours is the first response to my post. Since emporia did not respond to my original post, I decided to “roll my own solution”. I am a retired Electrical Engineer so I have the time and tinkering with electronics/programming is a fun hobby. I have provided a link below to my GitHub page where you can see what I did. I do not intend for my solution to be in competition to the emporia units. I am not selling anything. My solution requires more time and labor to implement, but most important to me is it meets my requirements. And it is all local to my network, no cloud.

If you are wondering if the Raspberry Pi 3B+ is powerful enough for power measurements every 2 seconds, I will say definitely yes. It has been running for well over a month, never missing a beat. In fact I recently started sending air quality info from inside my house via an ESP32 microcontroller to the RPi. So I can even display that data also, no problem. That is the beauty of using popular hardware and software where there are lots of examples on the internet from folks who have done something similar to what you want. Anyway, best of luck to all of you.

github.com/DuaneOne/House-Electrical-Power-Usage-Monitor-Including-Generator         (note I removed hyperlinks since my attempt with them was deleted, so you will have to copy and paste into your browser).

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