CurrentCost publishing application

This application reads data from the serial port of a currentcost meter, and
publishes some of the data to a messaging system on the Internet so it can be
graphed and viewed. The messaging system is the IBM MQ Telemetry Transport 
(http://mqtt.org).

Andy Stanford-Clark 2008



initial setup for Linux
-----------------------

change set_serial to refer to your serial port (most likely /dev/ttyUSB0)

change currentcost.pl 
  your name (e.g. andy)
  identify the serial port (as you put in set_serial)

in broker.cfg
  change the xxx on the first line to your initials (number of characters doesn't have to be 3!)
  e.g. ASC_realtime
  this is to uniquely identify your nanobroker to the broker on the internet



Download RSMB (Really Small Message Broker) from the IBM AlphaWorks site
http://alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/rsmb

Follow the instructions included with RSMB to get it up and running.
Note that you will have to chmod +x the appropriate broker executable for your platform, 
so you can run it.

Note that broker.redhat also works on other Intel platform linux distributions
such as Debian and Ubuntu.

*** copy the broker config file, broker.cfg, into the RSMB directory ***




to start things running:

start RSMB...

./broker.redhat 

(or whichever you are using)
or to run it in the background:

nohup ./broker.redhat >> /dev/null &


start the currentcost application
./start_cc


To see the published data, subscribe (e.g. using the java MQTT gui client (IA92 supportpac, 
linked from mqtt.org)) to PowerMeter/CC/yourname (where "yourname" is the name you set in currentcost.pl) to see the power data and PowerMeter/temp/yourname to see the temperature.



Instructions for Windows
------------------------

You need perl on your machine - download free from http://activeperl.com

The perl support for serial ports is somewhat broken on Windows, so we use
a little C program, sread.exe to read the serial port, and then feed that
data into the perl application.

Modify win_currentcost.pl and broker.cfg as described above for linux, to put your own
name into the two files.

Download and install RSMB as described above, and in the RSMB documentation.

*** copy broker.cfg into the RSMB directory ***

Start RSMB in a command window with...

broker

In another command window start the currentcost bat file with...

win_currentost 







Any problems or questions to andysc: andysc@uk.ibm.com or @andysc on twitter.