Smart-Monitor

This is the codebase for the project Smart Monitor, including the three setup variants:

• Docker compose file
• Automated setup script
• Manual instructions

For the fastest and easiest way, the Docker version is recommended, as it should work out of the box and can be easily edited via the preconfigured volumes.

Docker Compose

For the ease of use, a docker version of the Smart Monitor was also created. You have to start the docker containers with the given compose file and an example dashboard should be accessible under http://localhost:3000. In case you are running Windows on the Host and the Dashboard should also be accessible from other machines, you have to open up Port 3000 in the Firewall.

git clone https://github.com/captainfips/Smart-Monitor.git
cd Smart-Monitor
docker compose up -d

Access to the serial ports has to be configured for each individual setup in this case.

Automated Script

For Raspberry Pi OS the manual setup process has been baked into a bash script, that sets up everything and enables the systemd service for the grafana server. One only has to start the given setup.sh script:

git clone https://github.com/captainfips/Smart-Monitor.git
cd Smart-Monitor
sudo bash ./setup.sh

Superuser rights are required for the SSL certificate folders, because we need to change ownership from root to our user.

Manual Setup

This is more or less following the tutorials for each package/program and setting up everything manually -> NOT recommended

Mandatory Software

1. Python 3: Install Python on Debian-based systems
2. PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL Setup
3. TimescaleDB: Install TimescaleDB on Linux
4. Grafana OSS: Install Grafana on Debian or Ubuntu
5. Nginx: nginx: Linux packages
6. ACME.sh: An ACME Shell script: acme.sh

Python is used to run the logging itself and to write the data to the database. Nginx is used as a reverse proxy to the Grafana Upstream server hosted just internally. This enables encrypted traffic and makes later changes to the server routes easier. ACME.sh is a shell based client that issues the used SSL certificates at ZeroSSL for example.

Configuring the database

When PostgreSQL is installed correctly, the database server should be reachable via:

psql -U postgres -h localhost

Then each file from ./database_creation/ can be run via:

\i ./database_creation/database.sql
\i ./database_creation/fronius.sql
\i ./database_creation/iskra.sql
\i ./database_creation/eastron.sql

Now the database and three tables, one for each sensor should be visible with \d. The PostgreSQL client can be closed with \q.

ACME.sh for updating the certificate

For the following steps the domain <SSL_DOMAIN> and email <SSL_EMAIL> for verification have to be inserted!

cd ~ && git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh.git && cd acme.sh
chmod 700 acme.sh && ./acme.sh --install --nocron
cd ~/.acme.sh && bash acme.sh --register-account -m <SSL_EMAIL>
sudo mkdir /var/www/acme
sudo chown $(whoami):$(whoami) /var/www/acme
sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/ssl
sudo mkdir /etc/nginx/ssl/<SSL_DOMAIN>
sudo chown $(whoami):$(whoami) /etc/nginx/ssl -R
bash $acmeshdir/acme.sh --issue -w /var/www/acme -d <SSL_DOMAIN> --force --log
bash $acmeshdir/acme.sh --install-cert -d <SSL_DOMAIN> \
  --key-file       /etc/nginx/ssl/<SSL_DOMAIN>/key.pem \
  --fullchain-file /etc/nginx/ssl/<SSL_DOMAIN>/cert.pem \
  --reloadcmd     "sudo systemctl force-reload nginx"

With a command-line editor like nano or vim the cronjob for updating the certificate regularly has to be created:

crontab -e

And then add this line to run the script on every 6th day of every month at 2:19am:

# m h dom mon dow command
19 2 6 * * /home/{user}/.acme.sh/acme.sh --renew -d {domain} --force --debug > /home/{user}/log_acme.txt

Nginx

The nginx.conf already includes all available files of the folder /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/ so we just need to add the new file grafana there:

sudo cp ./config/grafana /etc/nginx/sites-enables/grafana
sudo systemctl reload nginx.service

Setup Python scripts

Then the data_to_database.py script has to be started every 30s:

* * * * * cd scripts && /home/{user}/scripts/data_to_database_5.py > /dev/null 2>>/home/{user}/log_error.txt
* * * * * cd scripts && sleep 30 && /home/{user}/scripts/data_to_database_5.py > /dev/null 2>>/home/{user}/log_error.txt

Configuring Grafana

The rest of the dashboard configuration can be done in the browser on either http://{raspberry_ip}:3000/ in case the client device is inside the same local area network or via the issued domain: https://ortner.ddnss.org/

Example Setup

For testing reasons an example panel has been added to the dashboard and a python script generating random numbers for the database is run in a docker container.

Iskra AM550

For using an Iskra AM550 smartmeter with the Smart-Monitor, the hex-key to decode the received messages has to be inserted into the logging/iskra_data_collection.py file.