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I'm currently involved in a project for the development of an Electricity Monitoring system for an old campus building. The device we are using for the metering is the EnerSure (http://www.trendpoint.com/EnerSure.html) from Trendpoint Systems. This unit has a serial port ans uses the Modbus/RTU protocol for communication.
Modbus is completely new for me and the team, but nevertheless we have made some progress. We have a few issues/questions on which we would like to receive feedback from this community.
Our ideal setup is as follows:
- Each circuit panel (about seven in total) will be monitored by one EnerSure unit.
- The readings from all the devices will be polled and stored in a database (single database preferably) at a frequency close to 1 reding/second, conserving the data from all the devices.
- We will later parse the data and make it available to different computers in the building (by having them query the main DB) and probably online for remote access.
Our current questions/issues:
- Using a serial connection for each device seems improper or inefficient for the proposed goals, since we would need 1 PC per EnerSure unit, or some kind of hub which would limit our sampling frequency.
- We've seen some Ethernet to Serial converters, but don't know about their efficiency for this kind of use. We would like to have each unit connected to the Ethernet/LAN which is spread all over campus.
- For logging the data to the computer, we are currently using a software called Modscan (http://www.win-tech.com/html/demos.htm) which only seems to support logging into a text file, making it impossible to read and write to it at the same time. Is there any other software out there which could do similar things but with a DataBase dumping capability?
Modbus is completely new for me and the team, but nevertheless we have made some progress. We have a few issues/questions on which we would like to receive feedback from this community.
Our ideal setup is as follows:
- Each circuit panel (about seven in total) will be monitored by one EnerSure unit.
- The readings from all the devices will be polled and stored in a database (single database preferably) at a frequency close to 1 reding/second, conserving the data from all the devices.
- We will later parse the data and make it available to different computers in the building (by having them query the main DB) and probably online for remote access.
Our current questions/issues:
- Using a serial connection for each device seems improper or inefficient for the proposed goals, since we would need 1 PC per EnerSure unit, or some kind of hub which would limit our sampling frequency.
- We've seen some Ethernet to Serial converters, but don't know about their efficiency for this kind of use. We would like to have each unit connected to the Ethernet/LAN which is spread all over campus.
- For logging the data to the computer, we are currently using a software called Modscan (http://www.win-tech.com/html/demos.htm) which only seems to support logging into a text file, making it impossible to read and write to it at the same time. Is there any other software out there which could do similar things but with a DataBase dumping capability?