beestat

Home Efficiency Update Mockup

Welcome to the future! I'm pretty excited to share this mockup of what I'd like to bring in beestat 1.3. Here's a quick rundown of the features:

• Select a date range for your own home efficiency profile. By default this will use the last year of data, but date ranges will allow you to customize further so you can better analyze how changes to your home affect efficiency.
• Select comparison properties like region and home type. This gives you better insight into what exactly the co...
  2018-12-04 15:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post

New Patron Perk!

It's long overdue, but I finally got automatic syncing enabled. This was a promised feature for just after the 1.2 release but I ran into some issues with performance and bugs and just wasn't happy with how it worked.

After re-writing things a few times I now have a fairly robust sync in place. The core logic has always worked well but it would only run when you connected to beestat. It would take about 2-3 seconds per week you were away to catch everything up.

Opening beestat will still...

Happy Thanksgiving!

The past couple weeks have been busy for me with the release and support of beestat 1.2. I've fixed a number of bugs and have a few reported issues that I still need to look at.

While that's been going on, I migrated beestat to a new server which has given things a very nice performance boost. Now that the server migration is complete I've been spending some time getting the automatic syncing working as well as spending some time building some internal usage reporting so I can get a better pic...

Thank you for supporting beestat!

Hi all,

Thanks again for your support; it means the world to me that you thought this project was worth backing financially. A couple quick updates:

• Version 1.2 was released last Monday and I had my second busiest day yet with 225 users (second only to launch day). I consider this a great success!
• Along with the update came a few bugs. I've fixed the critical ones and have been working through the remaining ones. Nothing major, just taking me a minute to get to because...<...
  2018-11-13 15:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Beestat 1.2 has arrived!

I don't have much to say except: finally! This version has been in development for 3 months (two of them active) with a bug-crushing, feature-crazy two week sprint to the finish.

Report issues on /r/beestat or GitHub.

I hope you enjoy everything beestat has to offer and consider supporting this project. My mind has alread...

Rebuilding the home efficiency card

Back when I first built beestat I decided I needed something that made it unique. After all, ecobee provided all of the same data I did. The only thing I was doing was making it a bit more convenient to view that data. So, on a whim, I threw together the Temperature Profile card. It took me a couple hours to knock out the algorithm and the same to build the GUI.

This card almost got the boot for beestat 1.2 as it wasn't up to my standards. The only reason it gets to stay is because there are a...

Has science gone too far?

This graph is starting to feel a little excessive, but I'm rolling with it. Newly added is the Event series which shows you the current state of your system. This is basically taking the data from ecobee's Follow Me graph and putting it here. I have to adjust to support a few additional values, but the hard work is done. The last thing to add to this graph is accessory usage so I'll tackle that next!

A quick graph comparison

Much of what I've been working on the past week has been getting the Recent Activity and Aggregate Runtime graphs up to snuff. There's been a lot of behind the scenes work involved with loading the data, but the look & feel has improved a lot as well. The colors are better, the themes are more consistent, and the overall feel is cleaner. I have some additional data to add to the Recent Activity graph, but notice Inside Humidity is now available!

All this and more coming soon!

Putting the pieces back together

Hi! It's been a month since my last update and I have nothing to show for it. I took some much-needed time off to relax and handle some other things. I'm excited to get back to beestat!

Enjoy this short gif demonstrating where things are at right now. There are a lot of improvements behind the scenes, so it's not quite as simple as just tossing in the last items and calling it done, but we're not too far off. My goal is to get all the charts back, then polish everything up, then release it. We...

Deferred loading and minor delays

One of the less exciting but also very useful features coming to the next version of beestat is deferred loading. Ever notice when you connect it spins for a while, especially if it's been some time since you last visited?

That's because beestat is connecting to ecobee and downloading all of the data since you last connected. This isn't the end of the world, but it's annoying and first-time users can sometimes have to wait upwards of 10 minutes for this to complete and they may simply give up....

Patreon annoy-a-tron

Part of running a Patreon means actively raising support for the project by telling people about it and encouraging them to become a supporter. Here's what I've come up with.

Every user gets this green banner up towards the top of their dashboard. To remove it, you can do one of two things:

• Link your Patreon account; beestat gets just enough access to see if you are a supporter or not. If you are, the banner will go away until you stop being a supporter.
• Hide for one month...
  2018-09-02 18:01:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Even as the day winds down there's still work to do!

I have so much left I want to get into this release. October is the big month for thermostats which gives me plenty of time to get things wrapped up.

The system card: reimagined

Here's a quick look at the system card in the next version. You will now have access to the following additional information:

• Temperature in tenths
• Humidity
• Running equipment
• Current comfort setting
• System status & setpoint
• Sensor temperature above/below average
• Sensor occupancy
• Sensor active in current comfort setting
• And a few other things hidden away in a menu

Hype!

Menus and modals and more

As I began to address some of the tasks for 1.2 I found myself a little bit stuck. The design I had was incredibly limiting for two reasons:

• Every card had a specific color. This meant new cards needed their own color and I then had to design the content of that card to match that color.
• There wasn't a great place to put commands and additional information. Adding more things meant cluttering up the UI with more icons or buttons.

To fix that, I took some inspiration ...

A little R&D on system type and settings

Here's a bit of a raw brainstorm on many of the different configuration settings ecobee offers. One of the first things I need to do before I can present recommendations is determine what type of system you have. Unfortunately, figuring that out is more difficult than you would think; there's no one box that says something like "Heat: Gas, Cool: Heat Pump".

For example, I have a two stage heat pump for both heating and cooling. Ecobee says:

hasHeatPump: true
coolStages: 2
heatStage...

What's next for beestat 1.2!

The dust has settled after the release of version 1.1 and I'm beginning to form some very high level pictures in my mind of what beestat will look like in version 1.2 and beyond. My top priority will always be to create a useful service that can help people analyze their HVAC usage to save money. To that end, there's only so much I can offer with simple graphs and trends. I have to do intelligent analysis of the data to present real money-saving solutions.

Getting there is going to take some w...

Survey Results - Features & Support

As part of the beestat 1.1 release I launched a survey to see what features people most wanted to see next, and how they felt about supporting the project financially. I'm glad I did!

Here are the results:

I originally thought people would want notifications more than anything else. After all, that's what I wanted. However, the data clearly shows that most people (75%) want to see more informati...