Connecting a Current Cost Envi to Arduino

A lot has been said related to the Current Cost Envi, specially since i bought one in December 2010.

I had previously linked to a computer with the data cable which i bought to Current Cost through Amazon, but the greatest potential of this is using it without a computer. So in the past i programmed a Arduino with some code from Francesco and all went well.

Later i’ve started in January 2012 a Domotics project and the Arduino – Envi connection was deprecated, and ended up with the Envi connected to a Raspberry Pi through the USB Cable.

A lot of time passed and since i had shut down the rPi and the Domotics project, i ended up with the Envi on my desk only controlling the power and temperature on the console. A lot of things change since then: i was putting the data on Pachube back then, and the Internet of Things was something emerging.

So back to work: one Arduino Uno and a Ethernet Shield are flying around and i had to use it in some way. I have some free time in my holidays break so let’s put this working.  In a glimpse i tried to recover some of my notes, or even the arduino code, but didn’t find any. So i decided to rework everything again from scratch and document all this now.

For starting connecting the Envi to the Arduino. The Envi has a RJ45 like plug in the back which “spits” a formatted XML. So just to read this you can cut any network cable and connect the pin 4 to GND in the Arduino, and pin 8 to any digital pin. For my setup i used digital pin 4. The connections are like this:

So after making this connection you only have to read a nd put the values in someplace.

The plan by here is to put this online. Back then it was used Pachube. Since then Pachube seems to be renamed to Cosm, and now is Xively, a LogMeIn Service.

Seems the old API is still around. The Francesco code for the Arduino which i talked before seems that’s needs an update so it can be used in Arduino IDE 1.0.5 and with the Xively API.

I managed to adapt the code and will try to clean it up a bit. After that i will publish it in my GitHub, but my plan in not using Xively in the future, and use a self hosted database, to avoid api calls limit, and have a better history.

2 Comments

  1. Bons dias
    Pussuo um medidor de consumos ENVI e adquiri recentemente o cabo de dados para poder analisar melhor os consumos. Saquei os drivers e o software aconselhados da pagina da Current Coast mas infelizmente nao tenho qualquer comunicação com o aparelho….
    Gostaria de saber que tipo de software/hardware usa para importar os dados do Envi.
    Cumprimentos

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *