PowerX has a Kickstarter for an energy monitoring/control system (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/45339608/powerx-energy-suite-water-electricity-gas-all-covered) and I’ve been grilling them for a bit about a local API. I had some significant concerns since it seemed like they were backing away from it. This appears to not be the case, they had concerns about what they could present in a local API and it wasn’t similar to what at least I would like to see from it.
I had an extended conversation with Manuel (it’s his show at PowerX) about their plans, the technology, and the challenges they saw with meeting our needs and I have to say I am super excited! His passion was evident and he was very excited about the things people are doing with Home Assistant.
They (PowerX) love the community and would love to work with us to make sure they do as much as they can for us. I was telling him about some of what we could do with a local API, adding Zigbee, sensor data access, an integration with HA, and being able to do local inferencing with an EdgeTPU. I just mentioned MQTT to them this morning.
He asked me about working with their developer (holy crap I’ve been added to their Teams!) that is working on integrations to see if they can give us as much as possible. I told him I would love too but I wanted to enlist some others from the community to help since I’m not a pioneer by any stretch.
What do ya’ll want to see from a system like this?
What could they do to make our lives better?
What do you want in the Local API?
What am I not thinking about?
TL;DR: PowerX has a product I’m excited about and they want to work with us to make it better. Help me be better!
So the way we integrate with other systems is that we implement their API. So if they have a local API available, it should be straightforward to integrate it.
We prefer local push based APIs. For example, using SSE or websocket to notify us directly when something has changed. If they only have raw values locally and not processed, start with that. See adoption and go from there.
Also tagging @klaasnicolaas as he has been researching ways Home Assistant can help people better manage energy usage.
I think anything not raw data would have to be relayed back from the cloud to the communications hub they use. I suspect it’s really only relevant for the water monitoring since the ultrasonic analysis isn’t a linear conversion like the rest.
I would ALSO expect individual devices that CAN be shut off (they are saying their gas can shut off the water heater???) to be able to be turned on/off. HA can control when/how long, etc.
It definitely looks cool. As with any product that is collecting the amount of data that this will, I am concerned about how they plan on handling that data.
As far as I can see you pay for the hardware once, and then they are offering “lifetime” access to the app. This model isn’t sustainable unless you, and more specifically your data is the product(how do they plan on supporting a project/product without ongoing income?)
This may be a great product for less technical users, but for those who value privacy and are somewhat technically inclined I can’t see it being a hit.
EDIT:
Just read their “privacy” policy. I wouldn’t touch this thing with a a 10’ pole.
Yep. I’m not counting on the lifetime nature of things, hence the insistence on a local API. They do plan on charging a sub for future users.
Re: privacy I’m willing to see what they’ll give me with the data I share but I plan on limiting access and if the local API works I can cut them off entirely without being SOL. I totally understand not wanting to mess with it at all though
By the way, the PowerX team just commented this on kickstarter:
Hi naPS and Kelly: We are actively working on integration with Home Assistant, a REST API and an open local API. The first two APIs I’m highly confident will be done in the next 14 days. The open local API is a bit more work to implement so it may take more days to confirm it’s working properly. That said, we’re working on all of these APIs
We will have APIs for Alexa and Google Home in the near future but currently, we don’t have an open API yet. The Engineering Team wasn’t able to provide complete information regarding this but they are still trying to develop this feature.
Google Translator: Business Weasel Speak ↔ English:
The Business Development Team wasn’t able to see how a local API would increase the revenue stream from a business model entirely built on data mining and collection, so they told the Engineering Team to put the local API, which was already internally available a year ago because it’s actually much easier to implement than a cloud API, on indefinite hold while we tell people how great our new cloud API is and that they should use that one rather than a super duper complicated local API we have shelved ages ago are totally still working on.
They updated a couple days ago. V2 product is shipping and it looks like there is CSV export of some variety. I’m disappointed in the lack of api support
I just emailed their support email ([email protected]) asking about local API access. Here was the response:
Thanks for contacting us!
Our devices and systems are not yet capable of integrating with other devices/systems. However, this is one of our most requested features and our engineering team is already working on it. This feature should be available in the near future but we don’t have a solid timeframe yet.
