Hi Everyone,
I have got a gas meter with a reed relay at home, one pulse every 10 Liters of gas.
Can I just connect it directly to my Flukso's S0 interface input, with no extra parts? What about debouncing etc.? I'm a software person, I'm not too sure about electronics.... ;-)
Regards
Philipp
Hi Philipp,
The best way to find out is to try it! See if you're receiving pulses by monitoring the syslog. Using a scope on the signal line would be even better.
If your setup is working, we can see how we can get the 'gas' charts displayed as well.
Cheers,
Bart.
Hi Bart,
It's working now. I have made a direct connection of Flukso's input ports to the relay, so the relay simply shorts the two input terminals.
The Fluksometer registers a pulse every 10 Liters of gas. I will not be able to see immediately if debouncing is required, since my gas consumption is very low these days. No heating in summer, and warm water is provided mostly by solar heat :-)
As you said, entering sensor type "gas" in Flukso's config interface does not produce any graphs on the web page yet. I've just set it to "water" for the time being.
By the way, here is an interesting thing that happened to one of my S0 electricity meters: Flukso displayed a load of 300W during most of the night - but not always! I knew that this was impossible.
I realised after a while that whenever there is no load on the meter (i.e. zero consumption), the meter's "Error" LED starts blinking. These pulses are, for some reason, also output on the S0 bus, which made flukso show this 300W "phantom" load every night. I've had the meter replaced now.
... and I've run out of Flukso input ports as of now! ;-)
Regards
Philipp
Hello Philipp,
Nice work hooking up you gas meter's reed relay to the Fluksometer! You could check the debouncing in the syslog. If you notice that a single syslog pulse entry increases by a multiple of the configured meter constant, then you'll likely have to debounce the circuit. Please note that the pulse inputs are already fitted with debouncing circuitry. This works fine for open-collector bipolar transistors.
I have recently updated the internal unit of water and gas measurements to L/pulse. This means that the meter constant unit for water and gas is now L/pulse, not dL/pulse like before.
And once we get around to refreshing the web interface, we'll make that 'gas' tab available as well.
Cheers,
Bart.