TPLink Energy Monitor

A web based monitoring dashboard displaying energy usage data and statistics for TP-Link HS110 smart plugs.

Written in Node.js + Express, and fully responsive so works well on mobile devices.

Features

• Automatically scans for TP-Link smart plug devices on your local network on server start.
• Realtime current, voltage, power readings.
• Recent power usage trend chart.
• Configurable power usage history logger.
• Plug on/off state and uptime.
• Daily & monthly energy usage totals and averages.
• Historical daily and monthly energy usage charts.

Setup

You can use any of the following methods to get the project running:

Packaged executable

The easiest way to run the project is to download one of the packaged executables from the releases page. These are zip files containing a single executable file and some config. Just download the relevant file for your OS (Windows, Linux and MacOS available), extract the zip somewhere and double click executable. Then go to localhost:3000 in your browser to access the dashboard.

Docker

Alternatively, you can pull the jbarnett/tplink-energy-monitor image and run that. Note that because the server needs access to your local network to scan for TP-Link devices, you must run the image using host networking e.g.:

$ docker run -d --network host jbarnett/tplink-energy-monitor

Node + NPM

To run directly via NPM:

$ git clone https://github.com/jamesbarnett91/tplink-energy-monitor && cd tplink-energy-monitor
$ npm install
$ npm start

Logging

By default this app will log the current power usage of each plug every minute, and store 24 hours worth of entries (removing the older entries as new ones are added) to files in the root project directory. This log interval, max retention limit and log directory are configurable in the logger-config.json file in the root project directory.

{
  // Directory path specifying where log files should be stored. It will be created if it doesn't already exist.
  "logDirPath": "path/to/logs",

  // The number of seconds between each log entry
  "logIntervalSeconds": 60,

  // The maximum number of log entries to store
  "maxLogEntries": 1440 // 24hrs at 1 log/min
}

You can also specify the path to a custom logger config file as a command line argument, and the application will load that config rather than the default one in the project root e.g.

npm start /home/username/tplink-logger-config.json

The logged data is shown on the 'Logged Usage' graph on the dashboard. Logs are written in JSON format, with the filename <plug-id>-log.json e.g. 8FCA808B79-log.json. Each file contains all the log entries for that plug, up to the maximum configured number, at which point it will remove the oldest entry when adding a new one.

If you are running the app from the Docker image and you want to change the logger config, you can mount your desired config file into /opt/tplink-monitor/. The logs can be accessed in the same way.

Each logfile is a JSON array of entries. Each entry contains a timestamp in unix/epoch format ts, and a power reading in watts pw.

If you want to analyse the log files in Excel or similar office tools you can convert the JSON file into csv format. This can be done numerous ways including online converters such as konklone.io/json, or if you are on a Unix system (or otherwise have access to sed) user ballachango has posted this sed command sed -e 's/},{/\\\n/g' -e 's/[]["tspw:}{\\]//g' <input.json> > log.csv

Note

Because the server needs access to your local network to scan for TP-Link device, you must run the server on the same network which your TP Link plugs are connected to. For the vast majority of people this shouldn't be an issue, and you can still use different network interfaces (i.e. plug(s) on WiFi and server on ethernet) as long as they all connect to the same network.

A note for Windows users: There seems to be an issue with the UDP broadcast the server performs to scan for devices which occurs when you also have VirtualBox installed on your Windows machine. I think this is because the response from the plug is routed to the VirtualBox Host-Only network adapter, rather than your primary network interface (for some reason).

If you hit this issue you can try disabling the VirtualBox adapter in Control Panel > Network and Internet > Network Connections and see if that solves the problem.

TODOs

• Show historical data
• Build dists
• Docker image
• Support switching between multiple plugs
• Switch to websockets
• Configurable realtime usage logging
• Show cumulative energy usage form all devices
• Rescan for devices on the fly
• Add daily cost metrics