{"id":389,"date":"2008-12-29T17:58:03","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T17:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=389"},"modified":"2008-12-29T18:08:49","modified_gmt":"2008-12-29T18:08:49","slug":"currentcost-the-cc128","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=389","title":{"rendered":"CurrentCost – the CC128"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CC128<\/a>The nice people at CurrentCost<\/a> were kind enough to let me have a pre-production version of their next home electricity monitor to play with: the CC128. <\/p>\n

I’ve been meaning to post some thoughts about it for a few weeks now, but the run up to Christmas meant it got forgotten. <\/p>\n

But I finally had a bit of time to give it a try today.<\/p>\n

If you already know about CurrentCost meters, nothing here will surprise you – this is more of a refinement to the current design, rather than something new and different. (If you don’t, I’ve written about CurrentCost meters before<\/a> – this new one is just the same, except with a new display unit). <\/p>\n

There are some improvements here that I like.<\/p>\n

Longer history<\/strong> – The most obvious improvement is that this meter maintains a longer record of historical power usage than the current model. To summarise:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/th>\n‘first gen’<\/th>\n‘second gen’<\/th>\nCC128<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
2-hourly history<\/th>\nnone<\/td>\n1 day<\/td>\n31 days<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
daily history <\/th>\n none<\/td>\n31 days<\/td>\n90 days<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
monthly history <\/th>\n none<\/td>\n1 year<\/td>\n7 years<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

This is cool – my CurrentCost app<\/a> uses the meter’s history as a data source, which means that I need to connect my app to the meter at least once a day to not lose any hourly usage records. With the CC128, I can connect once a month and still get the app to draw unbroken graphs of my hourly electricity usage.<\/p>\n

Gaps in the hourly graph has been identified as a problem<\/a> by several users of my app, and my own graph has lots of gaps in them. <\/p>\n

Multiple inputs<\/strong> – The new meter has support for collecting data from not only the ‘whole house sensor’ as before, but also support for up to nine individual appliance sensors. There aren’t any individual appliance sensors available yet, but this is an exciting sign of things to come. Presumably at some point there will be plug adaptors which include a transmitter, making this new CurrentCost display an aggregator for multiple sources of input. That will be very cool.<\/p>\n

\"CC128<\/a>With my current meter, the XML it produces gives separate values for each channel input for the current reading only. History is returned as an aggregation of all three channels. <\/p>\n

Impressively, the CC128 maintains and produces separate history data for each individual sensor as well as the whole house sensor. <\/p>\n

Electric logo<\/strong> – The meter also explicitly identifies the sensor type, with ‘1’ for ‘electricity’ – both on the display and in the XML data it produces. Again, this is an exciting teaser for what might be to come. <\/p>\n

\"CC128<\/a>Packaging<\/strong> – It’s a minor point, but the new flat pack box is a definite improvement over the bulky box that the current meters come in<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Reliable clock<\/strong> – Finally! The clock on my existing meter loses time constantly, so I regularly have to update the clock. I’ve heard that it should get better over time, but I’ve had the meter since May<\/a>, and it’s still fairly unreliable. So far, first impressions are that the clock in the CC128 is going to be better. <\/p>\n

Improved display unit<\/strong> – It’s a bit more attractive, and the hinged base is a nice touch – you can angle the display to face how you like, unlike the fixed base of the old meter. <\/p>\n

Works with my old transmitter<\/strong> – As I said before, the only difference between this and my existing meter is that the display unit is new. This means I have been able to use the new display with my old transmitter – which is good.<\/p>\n

\"the<\/a>Developer documentation<\/strong> – I spent a fair bit of time<\/a> trying to reverse-engineer the fairly ambiguous history XML produced by the current meter. <\/p>\n

It’s great to see that CurrentCost have started to produce a detailed description of the XML output by the CC128<\/a>. <\/p>\n

As a developer, this is one of my favourite improvements!<\/p>\n

XML includes version number<\/strong> – The XML produced by the new display unit is different to that produced by my old meter. At some point, I need to get around to writing a new parser for the CC128. It’s good to see that the new XML does include a version number, although it’s disappointing that it’s not consistent with the old format.<\/p>\n

It was: <src><name>CC02<\/name><sver>1.06<\/sver><\/src><\/code><\/p>\n

While the CC128 produces: <src>CC128-v0.09<\/src><\/code><\/p>\n

Speaking of things I’m less fond of, there are a few other disappointments:<\/p>\n

\"CC128\"<\/a>Two-hourly history<\/strong> – The meter still maintains historical electricity usage in two hour blocks. Why not hourly? I’d much rather see an hourly graph, even if this meant there was only space for 15 days worth of records. Two hours seems like an odd interval to use.<\/p>\n

RS232 socket<\/strong> – I’m still not sure about whether it’s a good idea to use a RS232 physical socket to provide a serial connection. This has confused more than one user, and has been the topic of dozens of emails I’ve received from CurrentCost users. It’s fine once you know what you need, but it’s not exactly intuitive.<\/p>\n

Confusing XML format<\/strong> – As I said above, having a documented XML format is a huge boon. But even so, the XML format is a bit clunky. <\/p>\n

For example, the history data is still returned with relative tag names (e.g. <d07><\/code> for 7 days ago), which means any user of this data needs to do more than just parse the XML – it needs to be transformed into absolute data. Why? It’d be much easier if history data was just tagged with a proper timestamp. <\/p>\n

Setup usability<\/strong> – The new meter has three physical buttons on it, so to perform tasks such as setting the clock, setting a cost of a unit, or choosing between ? and ?, means having to remember an obscure combination of buttons to press or hold. It’s a bit like those old LCD watches I used to have, except these buttons have even less labels. <\/p>\n

I know that keeping the number of physical buttons to a minimum keeps production costs down, which is vital for this to be a realistic option for people. So, it’s perhaps understandable. But even so, it means that the setup usability is pretty horrible.<\/p>\n

Finally, I should stress that as a pre-production beta version of the new meter, some or all of this may change before the meters are actually released… so you should take all of what I’ve said with a pinch of salt. But even so, from this first look, I’ve liked what I see so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The nice people at CurrentCost were kind enough to let me have a pre-production version of their next home electricity monitor to play with: the CC128. I’ve been meaning to post some thoughts about it for a few weeks now, but the run up to Christmas meant it got forgotten. But I finally had a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[324,194],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-cc128","tag-currentcost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}