Short update:
I was unable to complete this during the weekend, but I have finished all the new configuration options in the UI. It took a bit longer than expected because I need to get the internationalization right so adding more countries later will be smoother. What’s still missing is to respond correctly to all the new options. Seeing how much needs changes I don’t think I will have anything for testing before the end of this week.
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I have finished all the required updates now, however since the rewrite of the app was so significant I need to test this locally for a few days before I push it for testing so I am sure that I don’t break the app for any of my test users. I’ll let you know when it will be available for testing.
Update 2023.02.20:
Apparently, there is a restriction that prevents me from posting more than 3 replies in a row so I’ll put the status update in this post instead.
There were a lot more bugs in the code than I had anticipated. (see the GitHub ticket for more details) So I have been debugging all week. Unfortunately, I did not make it by the end of the weekend as I was hoping for, but the remaining issues seem to be small, so I have a strong hope that I will have something ready to publish within 1-2 days.
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– Just a ‘now Fredrik can post 3 msgs again’ helper post –
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I have now published a version for testing
I am currently working on a wizard to work you through the setup progress and time scheduler, but this is not complete yet, so the setup progress might be a little bit more cumbersome than the next version will be, but I hope it is sufficient for you to start testing.
Note that I have only one homey which I am using for controlling my home under the Norwegian power tariff, so all the Belgian testing has been conducted on a virtual homey test environment I created for this purpose. Thus you will be the first to do the real live testing, but I ensure you the test environment is starting to be quite robust so I expect it to work out of the box.
Please let me know of any shortcomings so they can be fixed, and if you have suggestions please shout out. I put an insane amount of effort into this so I hope it’s working as well as possible.
You will have to enter the “Advanced” / “Cost” menu in order to set the Country specific details. It defaults to the country belonging to your homey language, so I hope the default settings are already set to Belgium.
I assume that your energy meter is not supported by default, so I would appreciate it if you use the built-in functionality to send a device report of the energy meter so I can add support for it.
When correctly configured, the app will follow the power tariff and keep the max usage stable. This is my maximum hourly usage for February: (sorry for Norwegian screenshot), the graph will look a little bit different with your system.
Good luck with the testing.
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In order to make the app more reliable for the Belgian market I think I will add these two improvements:
- Create alarm and emergency power off when the meter reader is malafunctioning · Issue #196 · frodeheg/no.sparegris · GitHub
- Make use of the total power usage from the meter reader · Issue #197 · frodeheg/no.sparegris · GitHub
Please read through the first ticket and tell me what you think. Does it sound reasonable? Should I instead try to estimate the total power from the power readings from each device when this situation occur? Should I give a tickbox for each device to let you select which devices should be affected by the emergency shutdown? I will only consider such add-ons if you think the current proposal (Described in the ticket) is too brutal.
(please note that the testing of the Belgian power tariff must be conducted on the test version of the app as linked to above, as I have not pushed it to the public version yet)
The two tickets above have now been completed (in the test version only). It was more complicated than I thought so it took way more time than expected, sorry about that.
It should now be completely safe to use this app for the Belgian market - though I have not received any feedback yet so I’m not sure if anybody has tested it.
The next steps are to
- Add support for energy production, the app will not work for those with solar power currently.
- Translate the app to Belgian using ChatGPT
- Make a setup wizard to make the app more user friendly.
