Smart Oil Guage

Feature Requests
1

There’s a couple of projects out there to create your own oil tank guage, but a company already exists with a decent project

https://www.amazon.com/Smart-Oil-Gauge-Heating-Compatible/dp/B01M2VATHS

I contacted them a few years ago, but they did not yet have an API. I contacted them again today and received a response:

Hi xxx, thanks for reaching out! We have an API that we developed primarily for heating oil dealers, but we have a growing contingent of smart home enthusiasts who use this as well. We charge a nominal $2/month fee to gain access to the API and our dealer dashboard, and we would be happy to set you up on this program as well! Just email us at [email protected] once you have your Smart Oil Gauge and we will set you up. Thanks!!

So there’s a cost involved, but perhaps enough people from HA and the community could get involved to see if there is another solution?

2

I didn’t realize they actually have an api. I just got one of these a couple of months back. I was trying to screen scrape the website but I couldn’t figure out the login from VB using the web library. Unfortunately I just don’t have the time to get into HA coding (I’ve tried) but I would definitely be a user and if there’s any way I can help I’m game.

3

It’s a nice idea, but for me it’s a non-starter because it uses (yet another!) third-party cloud solution.

A local API; that is, the ability to address the device directly over the LAN, would be a huge selling point for me. Without that, it’s back to a DIY solution.

3 Likes
4

I actually subscribed to their external API service and I really would like to integrate it to home HAS. Could anyone help me? I am a bit lost here; I am new to HAS, so there are plenty of things I still need to learn. I would appreciate your help very much!

These are the instructions I received from the company:

Our API uses the OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials grant type. We are including a sample php script that your developers can use to get started. Also included is a .net console project if that is more familiar to you. To use either example, please enter your API credentials in the script before running.

A quick summary of the flow:

-Your clients will need to get API credentials from us (client_id and client_secret). Please keep them safe.

-Post a request to https://api.dropletfuel.com/token.php with grant_type, client_id and client_secret in the Post body and receive a short-lived Access Token (expires in an hour).

-Post requests to resource endpoints (i.e. https://api.dropletfuel.com/auto/get_tank_data.php) , including the Access Token in the Post body.

-Responses will be in the JSON format, and will have a ‘result’ property that will be ‘ok’ if successful, or ‘error’ otherwise. If the result is an error, ‘error_msg’ will also be set with a short description of the error. Other response data is specific to the resource request. See details in the sample script.

5

I subscribed as well, but am in the same boat. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

6

Have you found any help yet? Please let me know if you succeed.

7

+1 to this, I’m also interested!

8

Just to chime in here again - is anyone actively developing this? I’m brand new to Home Assistant (and so maybe not quite ready to take this on entirely myself), but I am willing to help code it if someone has more experience with Python and Home Assistant.

9

Currently no one seems to be working on this. Do you have an idea where to start?

10

I didn’t realize this when I bought the device, but it looks like they are really targeting fuel suppliers with their product (see https://www.dropletfuel.com/ )

It also looks like access to their API costs $2/month/device which seems a little crazy… I’m kicking myself for not having purchased a Tank Utility monitor, and asking my oil company to install the right guage (https://support.tankutility.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024514933-Can-you-monitor-fuel-oil-)

I’m not really interested in using their API if they’re going to charge hobbyists for using it. I have heard that some people have had luck scraping the site. I also saw a thread somewhere (can’t find it again) where someone was thinking about using the Alexa integration to pull data. But personally, no I don’t know where to start with this one…

11

Okay, i came up with maybe the hackiest solution, but it works. Definitely open to ideas on improvement. (NOTE: I’m still new to this forum, so if it makes sense let me know if this should be a separate thread)

UPDATE: See @Zalaban’s post below for a better strategy using Node-Red

The end result I wanted was a percentage for my oil tank, and that’s what I ended up getting to:
image

Here’s how I did it:

1. Log into https://app.smartoilgauge.com/
2. Right-click and get some cookie values… the ones you want are “_fpb” and “PHPSESSID”
3. Find a good, random user agent string to use… you can find one here: Random User Agent | User Agents
4. Edit configuration.yaml, add the following for the new sensor:

  - platform: command_line
    command: "curl 'https://app.smartoilgauge.com/ajax/main_ajax.php' -H 'X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest' -H '<YOUR_RANDOM_USER_AGENT_STRING>' -H 'Cookie: _fbp=<YOUR_FPB_VALUE> PHPSESSID=<YOUR_PHPSESSID_VALUE>' --data 'action=get_tanks_list' |  jq '.tanks| .[] | { sensor_status: .sensor_status, battery: .battery, sensor_gallons: .sensor_gallons | tonumber, nominal: .nominal | tonumber }'"
    name: "Oil Monitor"
    json_attributes:
      - sensor_status
      - battery
      - sensor_gallons
      - nominal
    scan_interval: 3600
    value_template: "{{ value_json }}"

5. Also in configuration.yaml, add the following:

template:
  - sensor:
    - name: "Oil Tank Percent"
      unit_of_measurement: "%"
      state: "{{ (state_attr('sensor.oil_monitor', 'sensor_gallons') / state_attr('sensor.oil_monitor', 'nominal') | float * 100) | round(1) }}"
      icon: "mdi:oil"

6. You should now have a sensor entity for “Oil Monitor” with some helpful values as well as “Oil Tank Percent” that you can use elsewhere

NOTES:
* I did try this with REST but could not get that to return values from the endpoint… something about the Python library that Home Assistant uses…
* I was unable to combine the percentage into the command_line sensor… if anyone knows how to do that please let me know!
* Because there isn’t any real authentication method here, I don’t know how often or even if you will have to log in separately to keep the responses coming. I’m definitely open to suggestions on this since it will probably be the single biggest headache with this approach.

1 Like
12

I’m interested in an oil tank gauge and wish someone would make an open local gauge. I also hope that the home-assistant team adds oil to the energy dashboard soon.

With that said the smart oil tank meter is the common one floating around the web. But has anyone come across the Beckett link connected tank gaige before? It looks like it requires a base station which means it’s probably running some RF 433MHz chip or ZigBee. Maybe we can use this sucker.

https://www.beckettcorp.com/beckettlink-connected-tank-gauge-system/

1 Like
13

I haven’t finished setting up HASS yet but I have an integration working in NodeRED (which you can also enable in HASS).

The integration logs into the website, gets the required cookies and then hits the same main_ajax page you are in order to extract the required data.

Screen Shot 2021-11-28 at 12.20.46
Screen Shot 2021-11-28 at 12.20.461200×782 121 KB

NodeRED import code:

[{"id":"679fbd256c1ec156","type":"inject","z":"4a88c65d5156b41a","name":"","props":[{"p":"payload"},{"p":"topic","vt":"str"}],"repeat":"","crontab":"","once":false,"onceDelay":0.1,"topic":"","payload":"","payloadType":"date","x":340,"y":340,"wires":[["1819507890ac02e0"]]},{"id":"1819507890ac02e0","type":"http request","z":"4a88c65d5156b41a","name":"Get Session Cookie","method":"GET","ret":"txt","paytoqs":"ignore","url":"https://app.smartoilgauge.com/login.php","tls":"","persist":false,"proxy":"","authType":"","x":350,"y":400,"wires":[["4fb8a0f4e7819484"]]},{"id":"4fb8a0f4e7819484","type":"function","z":"4a88c65d5156b41a","name":"LOGIN CONFIG HERE","func":"var smartOilUser = \"[email protected]\";\nvar smartOilPassword = \"P4ssw0rd\";\nvar cookies = msg.responseCookies;\nvar cff_nonce = msg.payload.match(\"(?<=name='ccf_nonce' value=')(?:[^']|'')*(?=')\");\nmsg.headers = {\n        \"Content-Type\": \"application/x-www-form-urlencoded\",\n        \"Cookie\" : \"PHPSESSID=\" + cookies.PHPSESSID.value,\n        \"User-Agent\": \"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.55 Safari/537.36\"\n};\n\nmsg.payload =  \"username=\" + smartOilUser + \"&user_pass=\" + smartOilPassword + \"&ccf_nonce=\"+cff_nonce[0];\n\nreturn msg;","outputs":1,"noerr":0,"initialize":"","finalize":"","libs":[],"x":340,"y":460,"wires":[["e1b71817c7ef2a23"]]},{"id":"e1b71817c7ef2a23","type":"http request","z":"4a88c65d5156b41a","name":"Login to the smartoil website","method":"POST","ret":"txt","paytoqs":"ignore","url":"https://app.smartoilgauge.com/app.php","tls":"","persist":false,"proxy":"","authType":"","x":380,"y":520,"wires":[["1c8ac8aee89e36fa"]]},{"id":"a7124ae6be1f3c0c","type":"http request","z":"4a88c65d5156b41a","name":"Scrape website for info","method":"POST","ret":"obj","paytoqs":"ignore","url":"https://app.smartoilgauge.com/ajax/main_ajax.php","tls":"","persist":false,"proxy":"","authType":"","x":370,"y":640,"wires":[["48570d654a9c6c55"]]},{"id":"1c8ac8aee89e36fa","type":"function","z":"4a88c65d5156b41a","name":"Prepare query","func":"var cookies = msg.responseCookies\nmsg.headers = {\n\"X-Requested-With\": \"XMLHttpRequest\",\n\"Content-Type\": \"application/x-www-form-urlencoded\",\n\"User-Agent\": \"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.55 Safari/537.36\",\n\"Cookie\" : \"PHPSESSID=\" + cookies.PHPSESSID.value\n};\nmsg.payload =  {\n  \"action\": \"get_tanks_list\",\n  \"tank_id\": \"0\"\n};\nreturn msg;","outputs":1,"noerr":0,"initialize":"","finalize":"","libs":[],"x":360,"y":580,"wires":[["a7124ae6be1f3c0c"]]},{"id":"48570d654a9c6c55","type":"function","z":"4a88c65d5156b41a","name":"Extract required data here","func":"node.status({text:msg.payload.tanks[0].sensor_rt + \" gal: \" + msg.payload.tanks[0].sensor_gallons});\nmsg.payload = msg.payload.tanks[0].sensor_gallons;\nreturn msg;\n","outputs":1,"noerr":0,"initialize":"","finalize":"","libs":[],"x":630,"y":640,"wires":[[]]}]

@Insearchofth1ngs if you’re willing to make your own you should check out this youtube video:

Alternatively as a HASS integration there’s also this github code:

1 Like
14

Sounds like a good price. Could you post a TLDR? I’m just curious what sensor make/model and what device(s) I’d have to buy to drive it.

15

Worked perfectly for me. Thanks for the code.

16

How do you search for the “_fpb” cookie? I don’t find it anywhere…

17

Is it possible to get access to the sample script? And/or any other documentation they sent you?

Finding the fpb was also an issue for me which is why I posted the NodeRED code above.

18

Actually in the end I used your code to extract the values and it works! Thank you for that, by the way. The only thing I am not sure yet is how to take those values contained in the message and transfer them onto the Lovelace dashboard. Do you know?

19

You should have an entity called sensor in node-red, that’s how you can pass the value on to HA.

20

Just switched to the Node-Red version that @Zalaban posted. It’s much easier to scrape that _fpb

One thing to note is unless you have very simple UN/PW you’re going to need to use encodeURIComponent() to make sure you can authenticate.

@bramrodrigo89 - hopefully you got your answer, there is a node-red integration through the HACS that lets you push data as a sensor: https://github.com/zachowj/hass-node-red