Automation - DC current measuring device

Rocket Soul

Rocket Soul

Well-Known Member
Does anyone have a good and cost effective solution and for measuring DC voltage/amps/watts that connects to either your phone/tablet, google home assistant or arduino/esp32?

Im looking at setting up separate trays with individual control of far red and uv and i want something that can measure the power for each tray and channel, so anythin multichannel would be ideal.

Ive seen sonoff and shelly do relays with power measuring but sadly its only up to low voltage, 24/30V. Any ideas?
 
cobshopgrow

cobshopgrow

Well-Known Member
you can have AC multichannel or you can have AC voltage/amps/watts for cheap .
not so much avaiable for DC incl. power measurement, but it sounds you could get away with these below, i mean the most important will be the power draw i guess.

check amazon or else for
NOUS A1Z Zigbee
will do "individual control of far red and uv and i want something that can measure the power for each tray and channel ", will do, but you need a plug for each light/channel.
theyre absolute reliable and their readings are usable, use them myself, sets up like "Ikea".

on Ali you can find
Tuya Zigbee Relay 4CH Smart Home Switch
for cheap, 15€ 4ch, there are 250V 4ch versions, not aware of 4ch who do power measurements on ali.

For DC you might be able to setup some based on this
esphome.io

Peacefair PZEM-00X DC Energy Monitor

Instructions for setting up DC PZEM power monitors.
esphome.io esphome.io
by using esphome then in to HA, but would need a bit deeper knowlegde, not plug and play.
you can combine a smartplug with a PZEM-003 of course.

you would need a HA running (x86 mini PC is my choice, 130-150€) and a 25€ Zigbee Stick, the Sonoff 3.0 Zigbee ones are good.
Of course HA runs in every browser as it have APPs for Andorid and IOS.
 
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cobshopgrow

cobshopgrow

Well-Known Member
mini pc wise, this guy does nice reviews.
these N100 ones are so cute.
they draw very little power, just a tad more then a raspi 4 and they come fully equiped with ssd lots gb ram, case, power supply.

normally they all will run HA very well.
i do use some similar with a celeron 5105, 256gb ssd, 8gb ram, fanless, noiseless, 4W idle draw, 150€ on ama locally.
 
cobshopgrow

cobshopgrow

Well-Known Member
have to say that i used Wifi and Zigbee, Zigbee wins for me.
The Nous A1 ones are pretty good outlets and very small, can be stuck next to each other in the outlet.
While when you combine some with a esphome based PZEM DC current sensor you will need Wlan anyway (for the ESP), so a wlan smart plug is a option, just take care you dont need to flash it yourself to make it work with HA!
 
Rocket Soul

Rocket Soul

Well-Known Member
Lou66 said:
Are the lights on seperate plugs? Then you can use smart outlets that have power measuring. They cost 8 bucks off AliExpress and connect either via WiFi or ZigBee.
Click to expand...
I would like to measure the dc side of things, for more exact values. Ac power monitoring there are many different options.
But i think the future would be running these uv/far red channels on dc-dc drivers; this means that you cant really get anything but total power from an ac meter.
 
Rocket Soul

Rocket Soul

Well-Known Member
Cobby, thanks for the info drop! :)

Ill look into those options you mentioned.

But i have also thought some more:
Im doing this with custom strips from an ali supplier so i can just size the string so that it wont go over 30V DC. Was going to do a strip with 10 far reds and 10 uv: now im thinking it might make more sense to do 12 far reds (about 2.1v each; string total about 25ish V ) / 7 uv (about 3.5v each, string total about 24V) per strip: that way not only does the 2 strings come in under 30, it would also be easier to compare the 2: if you send for example 350mA to each string you would know you have a similar output since the voltages are closer. Ok, the radiant output may be slightly different but close enough.

The shelly devices are nice in the sense that you can work them on a standalone basis with blue tooth /wifi and a phone app, but they would also be able to connect to home assistant at a later point if we wanted to pull everything together to one hub.
 
Rocket Soul

Rocket Soul

Well-Known Member
cobshopgrow said:
have to say that i used Wifi and Zigbee, Zigbee wins for me.
The Nous A1 ones are pretty good outlets and very small, can be stuck next to each other in the outlet.
While when you combine some with a esphome based PZEM DC current sensor you will need Wlan anyway (for the ESP), so a wlan smart plug is a option, just take care you dont need to flash it yourself to make it work with HA!
Click to expand...
If i can i will try to avoid wifi, prefer bluetooth aswell.
 
Rocket Soul

Rocket Soul

Well-Known Member
Billy the Mountain

Billy the Mountain

Well-Known Member
Oops, I didn't catch that, I'm more the DIY type.
I'm not aware of anything commercial to do that for DC current, many smart plugs will provide current, but AC only.

It's not that difficult to send the INA169 output to HA via a microcontroller with mqtt if you're adventuresome
 
cobshopgrow

cobshopgrow

Well-Known Member
Rocket Soul said:
If i can i will try to avoid wifi, prefer bluetooth aswell.
Click to expand...
wifi is also fine to me as long its local and not over the china cloud.
they all have their pros and cons.
BT low energy have a very limited range, i need to use a wifi BT proxy to use my Miplant sensor f.e.
Zigbee have a nice product range to my view, also good battery driven devices which is harder to do with wifi (at least no coincell devices), so such a stick is worth it in my eyes.
be aware, to my knowledge BT is used only by he shellys to config your devices,to connect to the wifi basically, and needs a hub then anyway (which HA would serves as and you need a timer anyway).
Which shelly youre eying? there are so many...
 
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cobshopgrow

cobshopgrow

Well-Known Member
Billy the Mountain said:
Oops, I didn't catch that, I'm more the DIY type.
I'm not aware of anything commercial to do that for DC current, many smart plugs will provide current, but AC only.
Click to expand...
yeah, there is no ready to go solution am aware of either.
The INA is still a nice find as its supprt up to 60V.
I mean, this sensor can be brought in to HA aswell Rocket, its just not really plug n play.
these PZEM-003 linked above are at least cased and in combination with an esp32 and esphome it could be very easy to setup, middleground between diy and ready made.
 
cobshopgrow

cobshopgrow

Well-Known Member
Rocket Soul said:
Cobby, thanks for the info drop! :)

Ill look into those options you mentioned.

might make more sense to do 12 far reds (about 2.1v each; string total about 25ish V ) / 7 uv (about 3.5v each, string total about 24V) per strip: that way not only does the 2 strings come in under 30, it would also be easier to compare the 2: if you send for example 350mA to each string you would know you have a similar output since the voltages are closer. Ok, the radiant output may be slightly different but close enough.
Click to expand...
when you say 24-25V, i say why not as it will give you more options to power them.
somehow these cheap RGB 24V Led dimmers coming to my mind, no power measuring of course but quite effective way for your "DC-DC" needs.
while you would need some small limiting resitors (not so nice) maybe or really carefully evaluate the voltages you have at certain settings.
sadly i havent found constant current RGB led drivers with Tuya support, ymmv.... just brainstorming here.
 
Rocket Soul

Rocket Soul

Well-Known Member
cobshopgrow said:
when you say 24-25V, i say why not as it will give you more options to power them.
somehow these cheap RGB 24V Led dimmers coming to my mind, no power measuring of course but quite effective way for your "DC-DC" needs.
while you would need some small limiting resitors (not so nice) maybe or really carefully evaluate the voltages you have at certain settings.
sadly i havent found constant current RGB led drivers with Tuya support, ymmv.... just brainstorming here.
Click to expand...
Im looking at those small dc-dc drivers; i think they are called "buck" or stepdown; they go into another normal cv driver but allows you to pull a little current with pwm control for each dc-dc driver. That way i could setup each tray with individual control and eventually do all diming thru automation.
Otherwise i would have to bring in about 25 small but dimmable drivers, each on their own 1-10V pot: it would just be too many drivers and too expensive.
 
cobshopgrow

cobshopgrow

Well-Known Member
i see.
well, beside the dc measuring problem.

one thought.

Ali
5 in 1 Controller Tuya Zigbee Wifi Smart LED Dimmer 2.4G RC Support Alexa Google Assistant for 12V 24V CCT RGB RGBCCT COB Strip


such with constant current and power measurement and you would be golden, if you can arange with some tiny current limiting resitors above would give a elegant ready to go solution.

i would need to dig more in to what shelly is offering.
 
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L

Lou66

Well-Known Member
Rocket Soul said:
I would like to measure the dc side of things, for more exact values. Ac power monitoring there are many different options.
But i think the future would be running these uv/far red channels on dc-dc drivers; this means that you cant really get anything but total power from an ac meter.
Click to expand...
I don't understand the point? Your plants care about the light that they get. Not the power at a point in the middle of the fixture.
You have a quite specific set of requirements. No DIY solutions but then you want to wire them into the cabling.

I can't recommend using discrete buck drivers. The efficiency is about 10 % lower, than using a standalone AC/DC constant current driver. Each driver has about 90 % effficiency and your approach uses 2 of them. What youre building sounds like a research tool that let's you tweak the spectrum. You will have to work a lot get the spectrum right.
 
Rocket Soul

Rocket Soul

Well-Known Member
Lou66 said:
What youre building sounds like a research tool that let's you tweak the spectrum. You will have to work a lot get the spectrum right.
Click to expand...
Youre kinda right. Our grow is medium sized comercial, with 4 trays flowering out every 5 weeks. The idea is to max out yield per area and to have the plants as healthy as possible coming out of veg, with the plants being hard enough to take higher flowering intensities. Weve seen great improvements on the test tray that does far red/uva/uvb so deciding on adding this to all trays, even seedling and veg.
In order to learn how to use this as for max yield and potency its vital that we can control each tray independently. To control the tray we need separate dimming and some kinda read out of how much we are giving of each to each tray. If you have every tray on the same setup you only get 10 rounds to learn each year, if you can control 4 teays independently you can fairly easily learn how a cultivar reacts to different spectra.
No DIY? In fact every light in the grow is diy. As for control system im trying to get it as easy and secure as i can. I dont know really how to do the whole programming of Arduino or similar right now but the system needs some out of the box operability.
Also taking into account that im building this for someone quite messy to be able to operate: it needs to be able to pull as much as possible to the same screen.
 
cobshopgrow

cobshopgrow

Well-Known Member
hm, i think there is no ready made solution for your needs.
if youre not in to heavy diy on the control side, you have to stick to whats avaiable.
Sounds like a great idea to have 4 trays sie by side and see how they react in comparsion, i hope you will share some pictures and insights.
My 2 tent setup is a bit similar to 2 of your trays and as you know i play a bit longer with it now.
Shelly is quite open and can be integrated everywhere ,also HA, as it uses MQTT (over Wlan), but the BT feature is just ment to setup your Wlan password.
You might can set the power and send a on off, but thats without much use without a constantly running unit in the back, hub, HA server.
Or, in that case you might skip anything "smart" completly and use potentiometers etc.
If youre willing to use a Hub, i heavily recommend HA, its a bit overwhelming in its capabilites (held me back for quite some time from it),
but you dont need to go mad! (you can),
they invested a lot time to make it really userfriendly and easy to setup, i think its even easier then the IKEA hub.

So, my 2 cent for your tray setup:
-one zigbee smart plug with power measurement (will just give you a total AC side Wattage, by demand switch only one channel on and see the W)
-one 4ch zigbee smart plug in front ( to save wiring)
-4 Meanwell drivers AB or B type, or any other with PWM or 0-10 dimming input to this 4 channel "plug" from Ali.
-a ESP32 flashed with esphome plus 4 optocouplers an circuitry to be able to set the power, connected to your 4 drivers of course.
(going to build me some unit like this also prob. ....when i find the time and there is nothing premade till then).

-a homeassistant running
-on this install "simplesheduler" to be able to setup your timings, its very convenient.
-put your power sliders and timers on a dashboard, done.

you can control the complete HA over the APP on your tablet, just installation of HA itself needs a PC or MAC, to be able to use Etcher basically (easiest way).
 
Rocket Soul

Rocket Soul

Well-Known Member
cobshopgrow said:
hm, i think there is no ready made solution for your needs.
if youre not in to heavy diy on the control side, you have to stick to whats avaiable.
Sounds like a great idea to have 4 trays sie by side and see how they react in comparsion, i hope you will share some pictures and insights.
My 2 tent setup is a bit similar to 2 of your trays and as you know i play a bit longer with it now.
Shelly is quite open and can be integrated everywhere ,also HA, as it uses MQTT (over Wlan), but the BT feature is just ment to setup your Wlan password.
You might can set the power and send a on off, but thats without much use without a constantly running unit in the back, hub, HA server.
Or, in that case you might skip anything "smart" completly and use potentiometers etc.
If youre willing to use a Hub, i heavily recommend HA, its a bit overwhelming in its capabilites (held me back for quite some time from it),
but you dont need to go mad! (you can),
they invested a lot time to make it really userfriendly and easy to setup, i think its even easier then the IKEA hub.

So, my 2 cent for your tray setup:
-one zigbee smart plug with power measurement (will just give you a total AC side Wattage, by demand switch only one channel on and see the W)
-one 4ch zigbee smart plug in front ( to save wiring)
-4 Meanwell drivers AB or B type, or any other with PWM or 0-10 dimming input to this 4 channel "plug" from Ali.
-a ESP32 flashed with esphome plus 4 optocouplers an circuitry to be able to set the power, connected to your 4 drivers of course.
(going to build me some unit like this also prob. ....when i find the time and there is nothing premade till then).

-a homeassistant running
-on this install "simplesheduler" to be able to setup your timings, its very convenient.
-put your power sliders and timers on a dashboard, done.

you can control the complete HA over the APP on your tablet, just installation of HA itself needs a PC or MAC, to be able to use Etcher basically (easiest way).
Click to expand...
Thats a lot of info to digest. Need to familiarise myself first but will get back to you on this stuff.
The basic thing im doing now is to make sure that i can basic functionality from these devices until i can get a proper automation system installed but also to make sure the gear will be able to do all i need once fully integrated.
 
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