This evening I made rather better progress with emoncms than I did a couple of days ago. I decided to go all-in and set up supervisord to control the processes running in the Docker container and that seemed to work fine up to the point where the process importing from MQTT died 🙁
Further investigation revealed a bug or two in the import script which I bodged up to the point where the script ran happily and imported no data whatsoever. In fact as far as I could see, it wasn’t even being sent any data despite the fact I could see it with a standalone client.
It wasn’t for some time that the possibility occurred to me that perhaps an authenticated user might not be allowed to subscribe to topics that are available to unauthenticated users in Mosquitto. I added a specific entry in the ACL file for my emoncms user and data started arriving straight away!
There’s still a bit of work to do now however, hence the step back. First I need to find out which of the two near-identical scripts for importing data from MQTT I should actually be using and test/fix it appropriately if it doesn’t work.
I also need to understand how to import my Watt-hour figures properly. I suspect that to be able to get daily usage graphs then I need to push the data through some more feed processing, which means modifying the device templates that I already have.
Finally I need to create systemd configurations to start the Docker image and the process that reads the data off the RFXcom unit. At that point I should hopefully be able to document it all.