I Wanna track my water and gas

[JavaLaurence]

Hi fellow control freaks.

I have some very humble goals, namely to be able to track my water/gas/electricity meters' relentless progress via my Mac, using some clean and cheap wireless solution.

Initially I would be happy to track only our gas and/or water consumption. Based on the success of such an initial goal, I may extend my measuring obsession to other sources.

I know virtually nothing about the domotica world, but have already seen that HomeSeer seems to be popular.. I am not interested in using that program (too costly, apparently horrible UI too).

My ideal solution would comprise a small object on/near the meter, a small object near my Mac (USB connected?), and some free software to read the counters. The latter may be as primitive as can be.. as a programmer I may be able to write something that takes raw data and visualizes it as a nice graph.

Thanks!

Laurence

[sj3fk3]

I would go for http://www.rfxcom.com/ it's cheap, wireless does what you want (possibly with the optional meter devices) and will work on a mac. With the added bonus that you can do a LOT more stuff with it

[ewatje]

I looked at rfxcom as well, but currently new RFX meter is being developed. I took the step into the unknown world and started playing around with arduino board. Nice to learn something about electronics... hmm.. I still don't really understand, but copy paste we can manage

http://www.wattez-ict.nl/energie/?page_id=174

[JavaLaurence]

Thx for the replies. I also looked at the RfxCom product, but the currently discontinued status put me off.

So I also took a step into unknown and started building a system built around TinkerForge components. So far, I haven't got any smart metering done, but I do have a water pump control system fully operational. I've got virtually zero electronics experience, but the TinkerForge approach makes it possible for me to "do stuff".

For the water/gas metering, I'm now almost ready to dive into a solution using an Analog In TinkerForge bricklet.