Hi all. So I recently purchased an Iotawatt as a cheaper alternative to some of the more expensive tools, with similar number of inputs, that can be used in an energy audit environment for clients. I was not prepared for the complexity involved, especially since I have limited to none experience in this coding environment.
Since I will be doing energy audits on a site remote to my office I need access to the logged data for compiling a report - for this reason I understand that I need to use something like InfluxDB and Grafana as the iotawatt can only be accessed directly through a local network and not from outside?
What I am actually getting to is that, is there anyone who would be able/willing to assist in a remote setup to help me configure the device with InfluxDB and Grafana?
I have a Rasberry Pi3B to use as host.
The Iotawatt is setup and I have already connected InfluxDB webservice to the Iotawatt and managed to get into the Grafana interface but no data seems to be pulling through on the created database?
You can access the IoTaWatt directly from the internet using port-forwarding to map an external port to the IoTaWatt port 80. You may need help doing this as every router does it a little differently. There are tons of tutorials on the internet and YouTube. Just search for “port forwarding”. Be sure to set a password in the IoTaWatt if you do setup internet access.
Get yourself a 4G router, connect it to the IotaWatt and configure, as Bob has mentioned, port forwarding. You then have a stand-alone monitoring solution that is not dependant on your client’s network. A TP-Link MR6400 is an example. The IotaWatt doesn’t transmit huge amounts of data so it should be reasonably cheap to implement. Use the USB on the device to provide 5V to the IotaWatt although you will still need the 9V AC reference transformer.
A minor issue with setting anything up on a local host (RP) is you will still need to set remote access up to that device. As the IotaWatt has its own long term storage and display capabilities, it seems to be bit of overkill.
I use EmonCMS on a cloud server as my repository. I don’t have any Grafana/InfluxDB experience but setting up an RP for EmonCMS is a simple as following one of the many tutorials -
Like many things, it depends on what you want. Also, like many things figuring out what you want can be the hard part.
IotaWatt provides data, perhaps lots of it. Normally, one wants/needs to turn data into information and use that to make choices for action. So, what actions do your customers need to take? What information do they need to make the decisions as to which action(s) to take? What data, over what time will it take to get that information? Once you have that figured out, figuring out what you need from IotaWatt and other things will be much easier.
Thanks everyone for the inputs. For now I just need a simple means of extracting the logged data remotely and the port forwarding on a dedicated router that can be placed on site is sure to do the job.
