Ohm Automation Program

Having taken delivery of my Current Cost energy monitor on Wednesday and after a quick play with the unit itself I was eager to get it hooked up to the computer to get some useful data out of it. A quick Google led me to Dale Lane’s blog. Dale has very kindly published a ready made class library in various languages with methods for reading and parsing the XML spat out at six second intervals by the monitor.

The new Current Cost Envi monitor.

The result of this initial exploration is Ω Automation, a very basic utility I have written in order to relay the Current Cost data from the serial port, display the info on screen and update an XML file on disk for use by an even more basic companion Wordpress plugin. Take a look at the top right of this blog to see the fruits of this labour. There may be periods of no updates when I am using the display away from the computer (Another dedicated unit for Node Zero is on it’s way).

That’s about all it does for now but if anybody has any more suggested functionality then I’ll be keen to hear it. I am intending to rewrite using a combination of the Eclipse, Python and Qt technologies as suggested by gnocchi_ah! in order to make it cross-platform.

One thing I do intend to work with is the xAP protocol so I can push the data to Cortex for use throughout the house. If anybody is interested I will make the source available at a Subversion repository for collaboration.