EmonCMS Integration

[blaal02]

This EmonCMS implementation is great. Working nicely for me, logging from EmonTXs, EmonTHs (via EmonPi) & an IotaWatt.
But I'm curious, what others are doing with the Home Assistant integration? The core version is "working", but has that issue with Unique Ids.

[alexandrecuer]

Thanks nice to see it is usefull

You mean the emoncms Home assistant integration ? Cf
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/emoncms/

I know the integration needs updating :
home-assistant/core#86840

[blasa01]

Exactly!
There seemed to be some politics involved in getting the updates into the core integration (There are some PRs that have been created, but much discussion aound how to create a "Unique Id")
So, I was wondering if anyone here had found (or created) a custom fork that had some of that cleanup working.
Thanks, Sandy

[alexandrecuer]

Just tested the emoncms integration which is not very much used (9 active installations)

From my side, it is working ...

Just catch the addon IP through emoncms admin module, in my case it is 172.30.33.0

Then added the following in configuration.yaml and restarted HA :

sensor:
  - platform: emoncms
    api_key: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    url: http://172.30.33.0
    id: 1

after you see the feeds in settings > states, here sensor.emoncms_outdoor_humidity and sensor.emoncms_outdoor_temp

I have not yet tested the emoncms history integration which seems to be a little more used....

[blasa01]

Energy graph - yes, I just added all my kWh sensors from the default EmonCMS integration as "Individual devices". All I did was changed the name to get rid of the ":EmonCMS..." decoration.

Unique Id - If you try to edit any of the EmonCMS sensors from the UI, you get:

Where "politics" comes in is that the HA developers insist that the assigned id be somehow hardware assigned & not user controllable - but feeds are user created & configured, so concept doesn't really exist.
And yes, I too usually use EmonCMS graphs for detailed views:

Home Assistant "Beginner" - not from what I'm seeing!!

[alexandrecuer]

Thanks for the clarification

emoncms feed number is unique, so there should not be any problem I think

The integration already involve a get_id method producing a unique id based on feed tag, name and id.

The only thing to do in order for feeds edition to work is to rename self._name to self._attr_name and self._identifier to self._attr_unique_id so that then can be interpreted by HA as friendly name and unique id

So I've submitted a small PR home-assistant/core#117911

If accepted, it should solve the pb

[alexandrecuer]

@blasa01 : usually, you need more than one emoncms instance integrated in ha or one enough as sync module permis to share feeds between emoncms modules ?

@borpin: you know the common practice if there is one among emoncms users ?

[blasa01]

In my case (and I'm guessing most) a single EmonCMS instance is used to integrate inputs from multiple sources (EmonTX's, EmonTH's & IotaWatt's). I can't come up with a use case for multiple EmonCMS's feeding into a single HA - at least not in a single residential setting. When we get to commercial or multi-home implementations, there might be some purpose?

[alexandrecuer]

@blasa01 : Ok understood

I have a few questions :

1. why do yu need to be able to edit feed on home-assistant ? If things are correctly tagged in emoncms, the same classification should be relevant in home-assistant ? Maybe you need the ability to disable some feeds in order they dont appear on the dashboard ?

2. in case of migrating the integration to the configflow process the HA team is promoting :

• sensor_names and unit_of_measurement could be probably removed as feed editions through the UI will provide something similar...
• are include_only_feed_id, exclude_feed_id and value_template really usefull ?

[blasa01]

Hi Alexandre, 1. Correct, unnecessary ones I’d like to disable to reduce overhead. The rest I’d like to hide (not visible) so they don’t appear in the default dashboards. 2. They’re trying to volunteer you to do everything! * Sensor names – I don’t know enough about ‘feed editions’ to comment. I did rename my feeds in the Energy tab config. They imported as (e.g.) ‘EmonCMS CT 4 Office’ in Energy I renamed to just ‘Office’. Not sure where the EmonCMS piece came from, it’s not capitalized that way anywhere in my config. CT4 is part of the feed name I created – so I could have changed the name in EmonCMS. * Unit of Measure – theoretically these should match & not need to be set. However, I do have one issue where EmonCMS is configured a ‘Gal’, and I think HA is looking for ‘gal’ (trying to add water consumption to the energy tab) * Include/exclude – if I can disable feeds later it’s not too important. But if it could support masks it would be nice – e.g. include “*kWh” (I don’t see the instantaneous W readings being useful in HA) Thanks, Alexander (Sandy) Blackburn

[borpin]

The clarity is required about the Integration (a means of HA accessing emonCMS data) and the add-on (an instance of emonCMS running inside HA environment.

The Integration does need work, thanks @alexandrecuer for that as it is outside my skill set.

My personal preference would be to move the integration out of 'Core' so we don't get caught up in the Devs politics and move it to an HACS custom install - Trystan has setup an empty repo for that.

It then needs a UI setup to be created which could pull in feed names such that they can just be selected.

[alexandrecuer]

work in progress here for adding a uuid to emoncms : emoncms/emoncms#1888

[alexandrecuer]

Done in https://github.com/home-assistant/core/releases/tag/2024.10.0b0