Smappee - Electrical Signatures

Hi,

Hope this is the right place to post this but this product has got me a bit excited so wanted to start a discussion on this.

I have been searching for a way to tell when my lights are switched on in individual rooms as I am using LightwaveRF switches as they look nice, but they do not report their state.
I have also been looking for a way to tell when people are actually in certain rooms based on whether their TV is on which i use Fing Scanner for but the TV stays pingable for a long time when it is put in standby.

I may have found an epic solution. It is a product called Smappee. It is able to 'learn" which electrical device is which and report its power consumption. I checked and it has an API and from what i can see you can query this info via http requests.

Product: http://www.smappee.com/uk/
API: https://smappee.atlassian.net/wiki/disp ... evAPI+Home

Now i am not a dev in any way so I will need some help to create a way to get this info per applianceID into Indigo, ideally this would show as a device with its power consumption next to each device but having it just write the value of each appliances consumption into a unique Variable (like fingscan) would do the job also.

I am going to buy one of these even though they are quite expensive even if it is not possible to get the data i want via the API as it is damn useful as a stand alone device anyway but to integrate this into Indigo opens so many possibilities.

Anyone have any experience with this device or anything like it (the closest thing i have ever found before was the Brultech device but not available in the UK and needs many sensors not just 1)?

[jay (support)]

Sounds interesting. Perhaps one of the 3rd party developers would be interested in tackling this.

[MODERATOR NOTE] Moved to the correct forum.

OK so picked one of these up from the Apple store today and i have requested a client id and client secret for the oauth authentication for the API.

Will see how fast i get a reply and also let the device figure out what device is what then I will see if i can have a play trying to GET some of the data.

I am very interested in how you get on with the actual use of the device and how good it is at determining what device is 'on' and 'off' i.e. its electrical signature interpretation.

I am particularly interested in the SolarPV aspect as at the moment I can measure the generation and my actual usage off the grid but not how much I am using of what I am generating as my SolarPV is fed directly into the consumer unit - this might solve this issue for me.

I have had a brief look at the API and it all seems doable.

I have looked for it on the online Apple Store but can't see it.

Yeah, i am toying with the idea of SolarPV but i wanted to get my consumption right down before venturing down that road. And to be fair my heating/hot water is my biggest spend and thats all gas so focusing more on Solar Hot Water at the moment but then will look at PV but that is WAY of topic now

I will keep this thread posted as if it work the way i hope it does it could be invaluable for presence detection (is device x on in rom y), alerting of leaving devices on/turning stuff off if its been on for a long time (iron etc.).

I don't think its on the apple website yet and when i went to store to pay with the Apple Store scan me feature to pay, the app did not recognise the barcode so I guess it has literally just arrived in store.

Right now it is in learning mode so i have no idea how long it will take to figure out which appliance is which but setup was easy so just a waiting game now. You can "teach" it which appliance i which by going around turing stuff on and off while it "recoded" the signatures, but i want to see how good it is at finding the stuff by itself.

I was looking at the Smappee website and see that they also self Comfort Plugs (I think one comes with the kit?) on the website they are shown as non-uk sockets - are they in fact UK? It would be useful to control these from Indigo as well if that is possible.

Yes there is a UK one in the box. Have not even tried it yet. I will dig it out and see if RRXtrx433 can see it at least. If so I will see if it is already controlled. It says on the box that its a 433Mhz device.

OK so after 2 days with this thing running, it by itself has detected my 1 of my fridges, the washing machine and my Oven. I "trained" it on my Coffee Maker and it has not failed to tell me when this device is turned on or off even if the oven, lights and dish washer is on so it is defiantly smarter than just pure mapping of Average Watts used to the device.
Also when i say On or Off i mean when the device starts doing something so in standby it sees the coffee machine as off and same goes for the fridge, when the fridge compressor is not running it is off so for these it may not be super useful to use in Indigo but for static on/off things or dimmed things then this should still be able to determine if my lights are on or off in each room. This was the point of this device for me as there are no good looking wave dimmers/2 wire on/off switches that don't cost over £100 per switch so using crappy lightwaverf as they at least look good and fit 60% of the bill.

I am still waiting for the API client id and secret so i can attempt to pull the appliance id data via http but the device so far seems pretty accurate. Time will tell on that one though.

I will try and find some time to train this thing on some lights tonight and see how that goes but so far, at least as an engery monitor that can determine individual devices, i am very impressed. Time will tell if it is accurate.

Also, the plug was not seen as an unknown device in Indego in the log so i assume that rfxtrx can not recognise it yet but i will try it with the rfxtrx windows app and see if i can get it to show there. If not i might just send Rfxtrx my plug to be added to the supported hardware so they have the device to test with as these would work out to be about £10 each as a box of 6 is less that £60. Could be a good cheap option for simple on/off. It rated up to 3000w. I doubt they report state though.

An encouraging update

What Apple Store did you get it from? I tried Brighton but they had never heard of it

Oh odd! I got it at the Milton Keynes apple store. Their website states (Smappee website) that it is in apple stores across Europe. I guess i was lucky.

Their own Apple App barcode scanner does not recognise it but their PoS devices do so maybe the Brighton store has not put them out on the shelf yet. They Apple guy had no idea what it was, so I'm not surprised they had not heard of it.

OK so they have sent me the API Client ID and Secret... Now i just need to figure out how the hell to use it... Scripting is about the best i have done, never used OAuth...

Just placed an order for the Solar PV version via their website.

I will start thinking about how to do a Plugin to support this if nobody else beats me to it

This was the point of this device for me as there are no good looking wave dimmers/2 wire on/off switches that don't cost over £100 per switch so using crappy lightwaverf as they at least look good and fit 60% of the bill.

Slightly off topic, but why couldn't you get a fibaro dimmer and use with a nice grid switch?

Now got my clientId - just need the box to arrive

I asked about controlling the Comfort Plug and it is apparently in the works and therefore we will be able to control them via the API which is good news.

Off topic:

Slightly off topic, but why couldn't you get a fibaro dimmer and use with a nice grid switch?

That's how I control my down-lighters in the hall and landing via grid switches. The only problem that has to be overcome is to to be able to get at the wiring for the ceiling rose - in my case I was able to put the Fibaro dimmer in the ceiling void (accessible via the downlighter holes). It would be great if there was a ceiling rose that would take the Fibaro dimmer and therefore it would avoid having to get into the void (taking up floor boards etc).

OK so been seeing what i can pull back from the API using curl and using oath.

This is what i can see when i request /info on my service location:

{
"lon": 0.0,
"lat": 0.0,
"electricityCost": 0.13,
"electricityCurrency": "EUR",
"appliances": [
{
"id": 3,
"name": "Oven",
"type": ""
},
{
"id": 6,
"name": "Washing Machine?",
"type": ""
},
{
"id": 1,
"name": "Coffee Machine",
"type": ""
},
{
"id": 2,
"name": "Fridge Freezer",
"type": ""
}
],
"actuators": [
{
"id": 1,
"name": "Plug 1"
}
],
"serviceLocationId": xxxx,
"name": "Home"

Next armed with the id's i checked events of applianceId=2 between 7pm today and 9pm today and got this:

[
{
"activePower": -95.0,
"applianceId": 2,
"timestamp": 1405544181854
},
{
"activePower": -101.0,
"applianceId": 2,
"timestamp": 1405542259416
},
{
"activePower": 110.0,
"applianceId": 2,
"timestamp": 1405541290863
},
{
"activePower": -102.0,
"applianceId": 2,
"timestamp": 1405540341803
},
{
"activePower": 107.0,
"applianceId": 2,
"timestamp": 1405539381554
},
{
"activePower": -94.0,
"applianceId": 2,
"timestamp": 1405538428271
},
{
"activePower": 106.0,
"applianceId": 2,
"timestamp": 1405537431303
},
{
"activePower": 115.0,
"applianceId": 2,
"timestamp": 1405533249196
},
{
"activePower": -95.0,
"applianceId": 2,
"timestamp": 1405532292766
}

Then i checked my consumption by hour and the first few entries looked like this:

{
"serviceLocationId": 1900,
"consumptions": [
{
"timestamp": 1405256400000,
"consumption": 36.8,
"solar": 0.0,
"alwaysOn": 0.0
},
{
"timestamp": 1405260000000,
"consumption": 24.6,
"solar": 0.0,
"alwaysOn": 185.0
},
{
"timestamp": 1405263600000,
"consumption": 376.3,
"solar": 0.0,
"alwaysOn": 2220.0
},
{
"timestamp": 1405267200000,
"consumption": 362.4,
"solar": 0.0,
"alwaysOn": 2220.0
},
{
"timestamp": 1405270800000,
"consumption": 362.6,
"solar": 0.0,
"alwaysOn": 2220.0
},
{
"timestamp": 1405274400000,
"consumption": 369.4,
"solar": 0.0,
"alwaysOn": 2220.0
}
]

Not sure how useful the consumption would be to the plugin or in Indigo but I can envision as a starting point to create a variable for each deviceId and each variable the value of "name" of each deviceId. Then periodically getting last value of the events for each applianceId and the value of "active power" is written to the variable for the corresponding applianceId.

I think as a staring point that would get us going.

The oath would need to store the "access_token" and the "refresh_token" etc.

Hope this helps in some way.