Using the Billion Power Gateway model SG6200NXL

[lyallp]

Just an FYI, in case there is anyone in Gentoo land that has/used to/still is using a Billion Power Tracker SG6200NXL with power clamps to monitor electricity usage.
This is not about home automation, only the power monitoring clamps.

As you may have noticed, the website to which this device uploads data has been closed down, telling customers, for example, me, that they will eventually provide a mechanism to download previously uploaded power clamp readings. Yeah, sure.

That's ok, because the Power Tracker has USB slots, into which you can plug a USB key and it will populate a sqlite database which you can download, at any time and examine the data. Or, you could simply unmount the USB key and access the DB directly off the key.

This is all well and good, but my power tracker has decided that the USB ports no longer work, and after factory resets and much hair pulling (of what little hair I have left), I was left with a box which collected data from power clamps but did nothing with it. The box was useless, a waste of quite a bit of money.

However, apparently there is an API, from which you can retrieve the clamp power data in JSON form. I have a python script which does just that, populating a sqlite database whose format is the same as the 'downloaded' database and compatible with reporting tools that may utilise this database. The script is run as a cronjob periodically (once a minute for me).

The reason for this post is in case there are others in my situation, I am no python expert, the script is very basic but does the job. Should anyone be interested, feel free to let me know.
I am not an expert at github and feel it is a bit of a waste of time to establish a project there for something so niche as this but thought this post would show up in Google at some point, bringing attention to my favorite distro, Gentoo.


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...Lyall