Day: December 24, 2024

The starting point for this project is the Kasa powerstrip I posted about, like a month ago. I’m trying o code up something to log power levels directly to a mysql db.

Python Kasa library

Python MySQL library

Both seem to have good documentation on how to use them.

The kasa library requires asyncio, which I haven’t really messed with async programing before, so I get to learn some new concepts. Though what little I know tells me it’s just a way to keep a connection open while waiting on the other end to respond.

asyncio is a library to write concurrent code using the async/await syntax.

asyncio is used as a foundation for multiple Python asynchronous frameworks that provide high-performance network and web-servers, database connection libraries, distributed task queues, etc.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html

This is really all I need to know, I think.

I’ve slapped together this to print the data I want with python

import asyncio
from kasa import Discover

async def main():
    dev = await Discover.discover_single("powerstrip.lan")
    await dev.update()

        # possible features:
        # state
        # rssi
        # on_since
        # reboot
        # led
        # cloud_connection
        # current_consumption
        # consumption_today
        # consumption_this_month
        # consumption_total
        # voltage
        # current
   
    state = dev.features.get("state")
    voltage = dev.features.get("voltage")
    current = dev.features.get("current")
    current_consumption = dev.features.get("current_consumption")
    consumption_this_month = dev.features.get("consumption_this_month")
    consumption_today = dev.features.get("consumption_today")

    # open file and write values
    f = open("power.txt", "w")
    f.write(f'Power On: {state.value}<br>{voltage.value} V {current.value} A {current_consumption.value} W<br>Today: {consumption_today.value} kwh<br>This Month: {consumption_this_month.value} kwh')
    
if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

Which gives me this in WordPress:

Not directly of course, I haven’t gotten that far yet. For now, the python writes a text file with HTML tags for display. I have an hourly cron job that uses scp to copy the file over to /var/www, and then some php in my functions.php file to load the file, and display it as a wordpress shortcode.

The stupid WordPress part took the longest, but I understand the layout of wordpress a little better. It has been around and popular for so long, that it is easy finding well written documentation, but I’ve found that a lot of it is outdated. It is very annoying to read through something, try it out, and then find your error is because you’re trying to use a deprecated feature.

The vision is a cron job that runs a python script to import data directly into the DB, and then php pulls the data from the DB, but the next step is to just get something into to DB.