Raspberry Pi Forums

Hi All

Dumb Sparky from Aus so be gentle

As I said I am an electrician but not do not specialise in IT and computing
I have a situation at the moment where I have a voltage regulator I want to remotely monitor
I have connected a Power Meter that can give me real time and historic data etc.
The meter comes with Win 7 software that I can be put on a laptop which can be connected directly to the meter.
I want to be able to access this data over the internet without the need to go through my lap top or a PC located on the same site and used by the owner.
I can get the site owner to provide internet connection to his hub/modem at the site but want it to be isolated from the rest of his gear
Can I permanently connect a RaspberryPI to the Power Meter and have the software that comes with the meter running all the time.
Then connect the Raspberry to the internet via its Ethernet port so I can and have the data sent to my server to see in real time and view and manipulate as I please.
My problem is the software that comes with the power meter is windows based as I said
Can any one give me a simple solution?
Really appreciate any help

Thanks

Al

The Windows 7 software will be of no use at all for use on the Raspberry, they are completely different CPUs.

The Pi can (probably) be attached to your meter (via USB presumably) but you will have to find some Linux-based software, that has been ported to Pi/ARM, in order to read its data. You success will depend upon the detailed spec of the power meter, the community is pretty good at hacking into these devices where those specs are not published to the the general public. The more common the device in the market place, the more likely you will be able to find a solution.

Try searching these forums, "power meter" throws up several posts which might give you a thread of investigation to follow. Do the same in the wonderful world of Google. You may be able to narrow the search down by naming the power meter specifically, but don't include Raspberry since the solution you require is Unix/Linux based in the first instance. Any software you find can then be queried for its use on ARM and specifically the Pi; it may already be ported and available in a nice package, may require a little more work or indeed totally platform agnostic solution.

It would be useful if you posted details of you power meter then you may get more specific and detailed advice.

Thanks for the reply
The meter is a PMAC770 made by pilot

I also know that it uses Modbus if that is any help
I tried to upload the product info to the forum but would not upload the pdf or word doc for some reason
Anyway hope that helps

http://en.pmac.com.cn/Products_show.asp ... =182702271 ?
or post a better URL

Thats the one Thanks

So it doesn't look like your asking for something outrageous!

Never used ModBus, not familiar with it, but a quick Google with "linux modbus" gives a wealth of material.

Extends the search to include "raspberry" and there's still a sizeable list, for example
http://mango.serotoninsoftware.com/foru ... /1402.page
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... f=7&t=3908 ... back to these forums
http://www.ebay.com/itm/USB-to-RS485-Co ... 0912364067 .. might ease your connection
http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4877

And plenty more. Enough to encourage one to delve deeper with some hope for success. Whether this is useful for you depends on your existing skill base and how much effort you wish to put in. You may be lucky and its all done.

Good luck.