Emoncms is the data analysis/display front end of Open Energy Monitor.

Has anyone here run it on Windows?

I know most folks here probably run it on Linux but I would prefer not to set up another box (my existing home server is Windows Home Server 2008).
The instructions suggest it is possible on Windows but it looks a bit of a faff so I thought I would check before wasting much time on it.

> Run it in a linux VM?

Thanks. I considered that but it would still leave me with a Linux OS to admin and it would eat a fair bit of memory and HDD. This PC is my home server (15W, dual core Atom, 1GB memory, 20GB OS+Apps partition) and I like to keep it fairly lean.

In the end I went ahead and installed WAMPserver on my Windows machine. It may well have been fine on XAMP or one of the other web authoring setups but WAMPserver is the one mentioned on the OEM pages. It didn't quite work out of the box but it only took a couple of minor tweaks and I learned a lot doing this (ie. it took me ages and a bit of cursing).

Emoncms seems to be surprisingly versatile. I thought I should share what I learned for benefit of anyone else wondering about doing some of this:-

emoncms is not a Windows program or a Linux program. It is all web software. It is entireley written (in PHP) to be hosted by a web server. It runs on a pretty standard web server. If you rent a server (eg. by subscribing to a hosting service) it comes with the right environment pre-installed.

WAMP/LAMP/XAMP etc are standard web hosting environments (wikipedia has more details for interested) that provide Apache web server + SQL + PHP programming language to the web software. WAMP is windows, LAMP is Linux, XAMP is portable etc and there are many others too but they pretty much do the same thing.

emoncms is a modular web package that is surprisingly pretty general purpose. It can accept numerical data from any number of sources, process that data, collect it into a long-term store, and you can set it up with your own designs of dashboard panels to display that data.

So although used primarily to collect voltage and current data and display pretty dials of power usage and graphs of historical data it can probably just/almost as easily do the same for multiple temperatures, power factors, heating oil useage, PV output, biomass boiler on/off times, or how much you spend on ebay each month.

Data is sent to the emoncms server application as web queries so pretty much anything that has internet access can log data to the collection. The server software will then automatically process and sort and store and display it.

You can run emoncms on your own server. Or you can setup a free account on the global server on the internet at emoncms.org . Either way it is exactly the same software doing the work. The only difference is where you send the data. If it is a server on your own network (can be as simple as a rasperry Pi setup) then you have low latency access to it (so adding data at very short intervals is simple) and your data is stored locally too. If it is the emoncms.org server then your data is on the internet and easier to access from anywhere but latency is higher and less predictable so you probably don't want to rely on logging power updates at half second intervals.

The Open Energy Monitor hardware part is a simple Arduino clone to take data from sensors (voltage, current, temperature etc) and periodically push it to the server as web queries. A web query is just a request to get data from a URL (web address) where the web address is constructed to include the data you want to send. The server strips the data from the URL, processes the data, and sends back an "OK" message. The rest of the smart stuff happens in the web server emoncms software and you can configure/setup all of that from web pages that let you link up all the data, do calculations, and design display panels.

Had a look at it but not had the time to play. I do want to though! IIRC it will take 1 Wire sensors directly or via a secondary board linked wirelessly.

Well it seems to be back up again now
I guess there is nobody else here using it.

ST and any others here that are already logging anything into a computer that just happens to have a network/internet connection... I would certainly recommend giving emoncms a go. It is pretty well documented and fairly easy to get working once you have created the initial channels. And once it is up and running it is simple to edit a layout to choose what is displayed on your dashboard.

6 seconds is probably pushing it a bit.
I am sending data at 30 second intervals and that seems to work fine.

I would have posted a link here to my test dashboard for folks to see but it doesn't seem to work properly.
I made my dashboard public and published it but if I try to connect to that I just get a "Feed type or authentication not valid" message :-/

Thanks Worcester. I have some PI on the shelf so I will probably give that a go.

Alternatively, I did install it on a Windows machine a while ago just to play with so I could put it on my home server... but I don't know if I trust it's robustness enough to have it on the server so perhaps a PI is a good way to go.

Thanks also for the weather station idea. I've been meaning to dabble with a weather station for some time. The Davis ones look very nice but I do definitely prefer the idea of cheap and home-brew and I am comfortable with Python so pywws looks very interesting. That Maplin kit looks a bargain to start messing about with.

So now I am mainly missing just one important thing - can anyone tell me how to make some of this "spare time"?
:-)

I have been waiting for some 433 MHz transmitters/receivers to turn up for a while now. Most weather stations and energy monitors seem to use these.
Everyone I know that has a weather stations says they end up with a Davis in the end. I am not in a good location to install one (don't trust the Porthleven one as it is surrounded by high buildings).
The great storm was not down here, think it went NE of me

Posted By: SprocketAlternatively, I did install it on a Windows machine a while ago just to play with so I could put it on my home server... but I don't know if I trust it's robustness enough to have it on the server so perhaps a PI is a good way to go.

Just use a Virtual Machine. Works brilliantly.