[John Polasek]

“Emporia has promised updates to better handle multiple non-nested Vue2’s.  That and other features (like better 240V circuit support) seem to be continually postponed.”

The feature that I would really like would be the ability to obtain real time data locally, but from what they have said on another thread, that one’s not even on their radar because “it doesn’t fit their business model”.  And this really makes me nervous for 3 reasons:

1. Our internet options are not 100% solid, meaning if the ISP drops their tower for an hour or so (which happens once or twice a month) my updates into the home control sever die until it comes back up.

2. If Emporia goes bankrupt and drops their cloud server like a company that had some neat soil moisture sensors that I used to adjust my sprinkler system through the cloud, I end up with useless pieces of junk that I can’t use any more.

3. At any time, Emporia might suddenly decide to become a “for pay” server to stay in business, meaning I’d be paying whatever they demand to keep getting the data;  they claim that’s “not in their business model” as well, but as every knows, people change their minds.

 

[John Polasek]

I have a related but slightly different question… My house has 28 circuits that I’d like to monitor (actually 36 breakers, but 8 of them too minor to worry about).  I currently have a Vue 2 with 16 individual and the 2 mains… showing about 300 to 500 watts of “fugitive” power in the 12 circuits I’m not monitoring.  If I get a second Vue 2 and add it to the same panel, can those two be combined without adding the mains rings?  I am pulling pseudo real time data into my home control software using Helgew’s Emporia-downloader Javascript () on Github to pull a 1 minute average once a minute, but am wondering how that will work if I add a second one.

 

[John Polasek]

I will say that I have to agree with Eric about the desirability of local access;  I had forgotten about it because it happened 6 years ago, but I got burned about $500 when I bought 4 WiFi soil moisture sensors that I tied into my home control system through their cloud based API and used to skip watering on my sprinkler system by shutting off power to the solenoids until the moisture in the zone when below 20%… and 8 months later the company folded and their website went 404…

 

[John Polasek]

An api that could return a JSON or XML response from the Emporia cloud, while not ideal, would be sufficient for me;  I am currently pulling download CSVs once a month or so to analyze, and have a plugin for the Indigo server that can request and read either format.  The only thing is that to be really useful for real time control, I would have to be making a request a minute, and (as others have implied) if EVERYBODY starts doing that, it could easily swamp your servers… which keeping the access local would not.  I will say that as soon as I CAN get the ghostXML working to read the real time data reliably cloud or local, I will likely be purchasing a couple more to equip my sister’s and mother’s homes as well.

[John Polasek]

As I said, the cloud API that I am looking into will be sufficient AS LONG as it does not swamp Emporia’s server as more people start using and possibly abusing it.  And apparently the Sitesage device (designed many years ago) simply dumped an XML stream consisting of Voltage leg 1, voltage leg 2, followed by channel no and amps  to the Sitesage cloud server on demand, because when I made the same http port call, that’s what I got back.  My suspicion is that the Emporia device in my breaker box does something similar; when the server calls a specific port, it responds with a list of channels and power using XML or JSON, since that would be the simplest implementation in terms of putting software in the local unit rather than having IT do calculations and initiating communications with the cloud server.  So all I would need would be the port number to make the call to.

 

[John Polasek]

Replying to wz2b, 7155… Absolutely I’d like a totally local solution;  I bought the Emporia in order to replace a 12 year old Sitesage system that died and would have cost 6 times as much to replace.  The sitesage allowed me to query the local device for instantaneous usage from all channels as an xml stream, and my Indigo home control system has the ability to parse either XML or JSON http feeds into a “sensor device” with a list of channel values.  I’d do a once a minute query to keep track of HVAC and aerobic septic running minutes to know when to replace filters and add chlorine, as well as flashing an alert when the running washer and dryer stopped drawing power out in the garage.  I’m looking at how to use one of the github “unofficial” APIs as a bridge to pull this same data from the Emporia server, but worry about them closing the access down if the load gets too high on their system… if they would allow me to query the LOCAL device for that info, it wouldn’t load their central server at all.

[John Polasek]

Semi reply and expansion of earlier posts;  Modification of the “Raw data csv download” feature to do time variant sums (ie 15 sec, 30 sec, 1 minute, 10 minute, 1 hour, etc sums would greatly reduce the size of the downloads, and providing an option to post them as JSON or XML would be a very simple (and standard) API that would provide a huge number of developers everything they need to take advantage of a huge database of real time graphing and logging Apps out there.

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