Looking forward to trying WattDepot

[Murray Dancey]

Hi Robert and Group,

I'm looking over your project and the introduction video on youtube.  So far, your talking my language!

I've been trying to find a meter-neutral energy management system as well.  I feel like I've tried almost every one out there, except WattDepot.

I have about one hundred devices I'd like to meter, spread across a large geographic area.

My current system is a MySQL server with some reporting, and custom scripts to collect data.  It works, but I'd much rather collaborate on a project, it can be lonely in the energy management field!

Some questions on WattDepot:

Why no mention of MySQL? 

Its Java right, but do the sensors and clients have to be Java?

One of my data sources is via a web-scrape of my utilities web-metering system.  I collect the past 24 hours data as a CSV, just after midnight on a cron, transform it, and dump it into my DB.  It works fine for my requirements.  Could you see this being able to be done with WattDepot?

regards,

Murray Dancey

[Philip Johnson]

On Wednesday, August 22, 2012 3:44:09 PM UTC-10, Murray Dancey wrote:

Some questions on WattDepot:

Why no mention of MySQL? 

We have nothing against MySQL, just haven't had a reason to interface it with it yet.   The new Postgres backend should provide some example code to help implement that back-end if you need it.

Its Java right, but do the sensors and clients have to be Java?

Definitely not.  The communication protocol between processes is HTTP, so there's no language specificity.  We have written some client code in Javascript and some in Python, for example.

One of my data sources is via a web-scrape of my utilities web-metering system.  I collect the past 24 hours data as a CSV, just after midnight on a cron, transform it, and dump it into my DB.  It works fine for my requirements.  Could you see this being able to be done with WattDepot?

Sure.  The only difference is that instead of "dumping into the DB", your client would instead make an HTTP PUT call to the WattDepot server, which would then be responsible for storing the data into the DB.  The design advantage of this approach is that you have removed db-specific and scheme-specific code from your client. 

Philip