Sensor for pellet burner

[pugho]

Hello

I'm building a sensor for monitoring the pellet consumtion in the burner that heats my house.

I put a TCRT5000 IR detector on the burner to count the teeth on the drive sprocket for the primary screw. It feeds pulses directly into an arduino nano that also monitors a few DS18B20 and my electricity meter. The arduino acts as the gateway of my sensor network and is connected via USB to a PC with domoticz running.

Is there a simple way to make domoticz recognize my pellet burner pulses and present them in a way similar to the energy meter or gas meter panels that are available.

Doesn't seem like a lot of people do this kind of thing for some reason.. Or at least they don't discuss it online..

(Yes, as soon as some packages with more arduinos and radios arrive from china I will make it a wireless network, but for now a wired one will have to do. )

[gohan]

Well, you see... Tinkering with Arduino and sensors is not something very common already, within those you need to look for those who are interested in monitoring energy used for heating, that are using pellets and willing to tamper with the heater; I believe you understand that there would be quite few left.
With all that said, I have no idea how to get that kind of data

[AWI]

@pugho There are a few more experiences with this kind of setup . As domoticz does not have a variable (yet) for pallet consumption you need to misuse a similar type like energy in kWh or something with volume (m3) to get it done. Take care of counting the pulses in your Arduino and send values (V_... ) to Domoticz.

[pugho]

I was thinking I would either just log the pulses, or use the electricity meter panel and convert 1kg pellets to 5kWh of energy..
Sounds like i'm on the right track then.

Is it possible to make a panel of my own, via Lua-scripting, that uses the data from a dummy electricity meter and presents it as a burner? If it is, I could probably figure out how..

[AWI]

@pugho You can do a lot of customization in Domoticz like custom icons etc. Just browse the wiki and forum (and don't get distracted ;-))