Recently my Vera Edge is unstable. Keeps crashing 1 or 2 times a day and only a reboot brings it back to life. The entry in the logging on the dashboard is always: can’t write user data. I contacted support and we are trying for some time now to get logging of a crash so they can troubleshoot the issue. So far they were not able to get logging.
Yesterday they noticed the smartmeter app on my system. They told me it is generating a lot data and suggested this could be the problem.
Does anybody else had the same issues and identified the app as the culprit?
Last week I received a new gas meter because the old one was making noises. Since then, I have been unable to read the data from the new meter.
First, I noticed that the electricity meter was still reporting data from the old meter in addition to data from the new meter. Of course, the gas consumption of the old meter was static, but the consumption of the new meter reported as zero.
I contacted Stedin, my energy network provider, and they told me that some administrative actions were required on their side and that it could take up to two weeks to be carried out.
Yesterday, I noticed that the electricity meter no longer reports data from the old meter, and does report correct data from the new meter. I assumed that whatever Stedin needed to do, was done and that I should be good to establish a connection with Vera again.
Unfortunately, I have been unable to read data as yet. The DSMR device shows empty values for “import gas” and for “meter number”, and the corresponding variables are missing. I tried rebooting the Vera, and even reinstalling the plugin, but that didn?t help.
Am I doing something wrong, should I excercise more patience, are maybe something else?
What I think is happening is that the new meter has a meter ID of 2 and currently the plugin only looks for a gas meter with ID 1. I will look at a fix the next few days as I think this will happen more in the future especially as stedin is replacing meters with a wrong (according to some dangerous) gas line connection.
Earlier this year (after receiving the smart meter) I installed the SmartMeter app on my VeraEdge successfully. Earlier this week I purchased an USB Hub and now have configured the USB Flash and the DataMine app on the VeraEdge. I don’t know exactly how I configured the USB drive, because the drive didn’t show up in the configuration window. I used the “trial and error” method in manual configuration window and finally the USB drive was recognized and is now in use.
Q1: Connected an 8GB flash drive and see that the DataMine device (see image 1) shows a “Disk Space Total (kb) 63340”. I believe this is around 60MB, does anyone know why this is so small? How can I get the total of 8GB.
Next I can see the data in the dataMine app, after graphing/configuring data, I can see some graphs. I have a hard time figuring out what each parameter of the Smart Meter represents.
Q2: Does anyone have an overview of all the different parameters for the Smart Meter (see image 2 and 3), so that I can configure the total electricity and total gas usage somewhat easier.
Thanks for your help.
Rgds Frans
PS. If this message should not be in this post, let me know, I will move to the right post.
I?m still a newbie concerning Vera, but I can help you a bit.
Q1: you?re right about the size of the drive, it?s approx. 60MB. You might be using Vera?s builtin drive inadvertently, or you may have created a small partition on the USB drive. You will need to create a large partition on the USB drive, format it, and mount it to a location in Vera?s file system, e.g. /dataMine. I can?t give you precise instructions, but I found some useful posts in this forum, so I bet you can as well.
Q2: you?re on the right track. Watts is the total power drawn at this moment in Watts. KWH is the total cumulative power delivered since the meter was installed (basically the familiar reading on every energy meter), KWH_frac is the same value, but with decimals (more precise). There are lots of variables that are of no interest to you. The devices keep them for other purposes than to inform you. You just have to ignore them and figure out what variables hold the interesting values,
Can you try this update to see if it works in your set-up? It should be able to handle any gas meter now.
If it does not, please set the logging level in the plug-in settings to “debug” and send me the vera log. I am then especially interested in the log messages where the plug in says it is ignoring the values.
E.g. “Smart Meter: Not processing : 0-1:24.1.0(003)”
Update, this version was not working. See below for new.
Recently my Vera Edge is unstable. Keeps crashing 1 or 2 times a day and only a reboot brings it back to life. The entry in the logging on the dashboard is always: can’t write user data. I contacted support and we are trying for some time now to get logging of a crash so they can troubleshoot the issue. So far they were not able to get logging.
Yesterday they noticed the smartmeter app on my system. They told me it is generating a lot data and suggested this could be the problem.
Does anybody else had the same issues and identified the app as the culprit?
Thanx![/quote]
Hi,
A quick test would be to simply pull the USB cable from the smartmeter. When there is no incoming data this plugin is not using any resources.
If your vera turns out stable after that it is this plugin, but honestly I doubt it is.
On one of my vera edge I have the same cannot write user data error coming up and I ‘fixed’ that by making a scheduled scene that runs every other day and performs a luup.reload. I have off-loaded this vera as much as I could, but it does not make any real difference. It is a possible indication of some possible bad NVRAM blocks on the machine.
Can you try this update to see if it works in your set-up? It should be able to handle any gas meter now.
If it does not, please set the logging level in the plug-in settings to “debug” and send me the vera log. I am then especially interested in the log messages where the plug in says it is ignoring the values.
E.g. “Smart Meter: Not processing : 0-1:24.1.0(003)”
Cheers Rene[/quote]
Doesn’t seem to work yet. I sent you the logfile by personal message.
I see the gas meter data in the log you provided so it is me getting the code correct. This one?
One other thing as a warning. I see you have the latest version 5 smart meter. Difference with the older meters is that this spits out the data each second rather then once per 10 seconds. Not sure if this could cause issues with the stability of your Vera as it handles ten times the amount of incoming data.
Also the gas flow calculation may be off. I will have to dig into that a bit further once you get a value to at least look at.
Just back from running. I?ll test the latest version later tonight or tomorrow morning.
Thanks for the heads up about version 5. I had noticed it updated a lot faster than every 10 seconds. If you need help with making your plug-in compatible with this version I?ll be happy to test stuff for you.
Just installed the file and I’m seeing flow and m3 values again! I do not see the gas meter number (yet).
Also, I seem to have made an error. I downloaded each of your files to the same folder, after first downloading the original file. So the first fix was called L_SmartMeter(1), the second L_SmartMeter(2), and the third L_SmartMeter(3). I uploaded each file to Vera without renaming it and now I see I got files named L_SmartMeter(2) and L_SmartMeter(3) in the list. When I discovered this, I made sure to upload the latest file without the (3). Could it be that previous fixes were okay but didn’t work because I named them wrong?
Thinking about the functionality of the plugin: if the electricity meter can ‘know’ multiple gas meters, wouldn’t it be a good solution to create a child device for every gas meter that the electricity meter reports? That way, when a meter is replaced, the old meter will exist as long as the electricity meter reports data on it, and the new meter will be created when the electricity meter starts reporting on it. In my case, these two time frames overlapped, so I would have seen two gas meters for a couple of days. One reporting a non-zero cumulative value that was static, because the meter was removed, and one with a gas meter number, but zero gas usage, as the meter wasn’t activated yet by the network provider.
Of course, the parent device wouldn’t be able to report gas data any longer, because there could be any number of gas meters.
Anything is possible in software, however it would imply quite significant changes and for reporting in DataMine or so you would have redo the setup. So IMO it is not worth the effort for the few people in the situation and the short period you would be interested to see both values.
Recently my Vera Edge is unstable. Keeps crashing 1 or 2 times a day and only a reboot brings it back to life. The entry in the logging on the dashboard is always: can’t write user data. I contacted support and we are trying for some time now to get logging of a crash so they can troubleshoot the issue. So far they were not able to get logging.
Yesterday they noticed the smartmeter app on my system. They told me it is generating a lot of data and suggested this could be the problem.
Does anybody else had the same issues and identified the app as the culprit?
Thanx![/quote]
Hi,
A quick test would be to simply pull the USB cable from the smartmeter. When there is no incoming data this plugin is not using any resources.
If your vera turns out stable after that it is this plugin, but honestly I doubt it is.
On one of my vera edge I have the same cannot write user data error coming up and I ‘fixed’ that by making a scheduled scene that runs every other day and performs a luup.reload. I have off-loaded this vera as much as I could, but it does not make any real difference. It is a possible indication of some possible bad NVRAM blocks on the machine.
Cheers Rene[/quote]
Hi Rene,
Unplugged the cable but it still went offline. Contacted support again and now the focus is on the Sonos or Honeywell Evohome plugin i am using.
Thanks anyway for your suggestion and your work on the smartmeter plugin!
