I’m doing everything you list and quite a bit more on a QNAP with a Celeron J4125. A fraction of the cpu performance you’ll have, yet very capable of all the tasks I ask of it. 16gb of memory is a good starting point I think.

What does your build come out at?

What does that mean?

“Just” some highly specific VM settings, in the end. I don’t know much about that, and terms like qemu don’t mean anything to me so I followed blog posts until it worked. (This one and maybe this one, I think.) It’s possible that it is actually trivial.

It’s been a while, but I can look up what I have when you need it. Feel free to ping me!

Yes, it was exactly that: Once I got the NICs set up the way I wanted them it was a breeze and everything just works. And I really like that I made every part work myself, no magic. I learned a lot, and wouldn’t have had I relied on Proxmox fiddling with the right parts for me.

Capture the flag?

I was in a similar spot not too long ago, setting up a firewall and general network box. I was going to go with Proxmox but a fellow Lemmy guy strongly advocated for Incus on top of vanilla Debian. I was intrigued and ended up going for it. Learned a lot about networking with systemd (bridging, IP assignment and so on) for things I could have gotten for free in Proxmox (literally a few clicks), and had to fight Incus to work with a FreeBSD VM for Opnsense, but I love the setup now. Pure debian with a few Incus VMs and Docker inside of those as needed. So clean!

Right, so I would need to do an OTA update for all devices I want to deplay. Thanks for the insight!

Ah, I see. I thought EM and PM are just other smart plug models. Sadly, not a viable solution for me- I need it to be a smart plug type of device. I wonder if those have more precise or faster measuring circuitry or if it’s just a different firmware for a different use case.

Hm, is it possible that “virtually immediately” means different things to us? I have now thoroughly benchmarked a Shelly AZ and am currently investigating a Shelly PlusPlug S (Gen2 I think), and they are both far from where I would like them to be.

Here’s the result from a 1.5h run, toggling the load every few seconds:

The PlusPlugS V2 is even worse.

The real problem with this, other than delayed and missed events, is the standard deviation. A constant delay would be okay.

That’s not a hard requirement, but I thought it would be easier if the device pushes out a single message when there is significant change in current (as the Shellies do) instead of having to poll as fast as possible and hope for a timely response. My limited experience with these devices is that they are not the fastest or most reliable HTTP servers. I can poll a Shelly AZ’s state at a maximum of around 3 or 4 times per second, for example.

A tight power_delta threshold and a millisecond timestamp in the MQTT message would probably solve my problem very nicely, but the Shelly I tested has no configurable threshold and only sends timestamps in minutes, which is of course unusable for me.

This together with runtime configurable thresholds would solve my problem completely.

I ordered one of their ESPHome and one of their Tasmota models yesterday. When you talk about configuration, that actually means compiling a firmware binary and doing an OTA update, right? Or is it actually just a config file I give the device?

The goal is to measure precise on-time for certain kitchen appliances, and to be able to differentiate operating modes (e.g. standby vs. operating, potentially power setting when on.)

It’s not exactly that, but let’s say you’d like to measure exactly how long a mixing device is mixing something, and you could guess the speed setting with some confidence.

It actually isn’t so much about receiving the data as fast as possible, but about precision in timing, which the plugs I’ve tested so far don’t really offer. Best I have seen so far is ~2s delay with a standard deviation of up to another second on a Shelly AZ… Not good enough. The investigation continues.

That sounds good. Will test.

Have ordered a few devices to test and will give it a go. Thanks!

You mean fire out data as fast as possible and take care of processing on the server? I’d be okay with that if necessary, but so far I haven’t found one that seems to even measure the power consumption fast enough. They all average over some time frame between a few seconds and even minutes. This is of course fine for regular home appliances, but not fast enough for the problem I’m trying to solve.

Sadly, manual reflash is sort of a non-starter for my specific situation, but I have found devices that ship with Tasmota and ESPHome preflashed. I ordered a few to test.

To be honest, my question is not actually related to HA. I asked it here because it is by far the largest topic adjacent community on Lemmy and I was hoping to increase my chances of getting a good answer because all the home automation pros surely hang out here. You busted my con!

Thanks, I’ll look at that device.

It’s actually not so much the fast interval that I’m looking for, but fast response to changes in power consumption. In fact, I’d prefer not to be flooded by multiple messages per second but to only receive them on significant change (where “significant” would have to be configurable.)

The Shelly AZ I have been thoroughly testing sends out MQTT messages when power consumption changes, but has a delay between 1.5 and 2.5s, sometimes up to 5s. If this were either faster or at least consistently delayed by the same time, I could use it.

Reading up on Tasmota I’ve seen the PowerDelta configuration value which I think is what I am looking for…

Thanks for the reply!

I have no experience with esphome. This list has many of the “usual suspects” (Nous A1T which I have yet to test, Shelly Plug S) but how will this solve my problem?

I see that there are a few like this one that come with esphome preinstalled (a requirement for me, I can’t use smart plugs I individually have to reflash.) In the device’s config file I see a variable sensor_update_interval: 10s. Is that what you mean?

What does this mean?

How about Donetick?