ISKRA Electricity Server

The ISKRA Electricity Server enables you to read out your ISKRA electricity meter and serve the current total energy consumption via a http endpoint.

This endpoint can then be used to add a custom RESTful Sensor in Home Assistant for displaying your energy consumption.

What is the use case?

The necessity to readout my electricity usage and display it in Home Assistant lead to the development of ISKRA Electricity Server.

The whole setup is rather simple and reliably monitors my electricity consumption for several years now.

I'm sure other energy meters also have an IR sensor, so this might be of use as well.

Prerequisites

For this setup to work

• an ISKRA energy meter with an infrared interface
• infrared to usb reader
• a Raspberry Pi (or something similar) with docker installed

This setup was tested with an ISKRA energy meter and an IR USB reader/writer from Weidmann Elektronik.

Server setup

The server (e.g. Raspberry Pi) needs to have docker installed. Please follow the official instructions to do so.

IR reader setup

Connect the IR reader to your energy meter (usually magnetic) and your server via USB. It is possible to test the setup like this:

Install minicom:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install minicom

Run minicom:

sudo minicom -s

Then you can select serial port setup. The output will look something like that:

Serial port setup ->
    | A -    Serial Device      : /dev/ttyUSB0 |
    | B - Lockfile Location     : /var/lock    |
    | C -   Callin Program      :              |
    | D -  Callout Program      :              |
    | E -    Bps/Par/Bits       : 9600 8N1     |
    | F - Hardware Flow Control : Yes          |
    | G - Software Flow Control : No           |

Configure the device:

sudo stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 1:0:8bd:0:3:1c:7f:15:4:5:1:0:11:13:1a:0:12:f:17:16:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0

Afterwards you can read out the interface and present it in sml (smart meter language) hex format:

sudo cat /dev/ttyUSB0 | od -tx1

Deployment

You can grab the docker-compose.yml, put it on your server and deploy it via docker compose up -d.

Usage in Home Assistant

Add this to your configuration.yaml:

rest:
  - resource: http://<raspberry pi host>/api/electricity/cumulated
    scan_interval: 60

    sensor:
      - name: "Electricity cumulated"
        value_template: "{{ value_json.value }}"
        unit_of_measurement: "kWh"
        device_class: energy
        state_class: total
        unique_id: iskra_electricity_cumulated

Afterwards you can add it in the Energy menu to have it plot your electricity consumption.