A Ukrainian developer shared his new project on Reddit — PowerTrace, an autonomous electricity monitoring system for Tuya smart meters (including popular budget models like the ATORCH GR2P-W/S). The main philosophy of the application is complete privacy, work in a local network without cloud services, and easy launch "out of the box" on a Raspberry Pi or a regular PC.
A Ukrainian developer shared his new project on Reddit — PowerTrace, an autonomous electricity monitoring system for Tuya smart meters (including popular budget models like the ATORCH GR2P-W/S). The main philosophy of the application is complete privacy, work in a local network without cloud services, and easy launch "out of the box" on a Raspberry Pi or a regular PC.
Budget DIN-rail meters like ATORCH are capable of measuring a whole bunch of parameters: voltage, current, active power, and power factor. However, the standard Tuya app cuts down on detail, shows limited averaged data, and transmits all information to Chinese servers.
The author admits that the idea of creating his own solution arose from a reluctance to waste time on complex ecosystems.
"The market for PowerTrace is basically the same as for Home Assistant. The only thing is that I wasted half a day with Home Assistant (and I've been programming for 40 years), so I decided to write something that would work out of the box, and not require installing special software in a virtual machine. Well, as for the meter, I connected the one I already had on hand," the developer shared on Reddit.
The dashboard runs completely locally. The development stack is as lightweight as possible: Python + FastAPI on the backend, vanilla JS + Chart.js on the frontend, SQLite database and WebSocket for real-time data transfer.
Complete autonomy: The application does not require account registration or communication with the outside world. The only outgoing request is to check for updates once a day, which can be easily disabled if desired.
Local polling: The Local Key is obtained from the Tuya IoT platform once during setup, after which the ISP cloud is no longer required for the device to operate.
Flexible analysis: The dashboard generates history by days, months, and years, supports dual-zone tariffs, and also counts "load episodes" (by setting a threshold in watts, you can visually separate the boiler or heater consumption from the background).
Health Score and Insights: A dedicated analytics page shows voltage sags, current spikes, consumption trends, and power factor. Analysis rules are editable directly through the UI in YAML format.
The application is distributed in the form of ready-made packages for Raspberry Pi / Debian (.deb) and ready-made .exe for Windows (with tray minimization). You can add a new Tuya meter without changing the code - the profile is described by ~30 lines of YAML, where Tuya DP (Data Points) are mapped. The author encourages sending him DPs of new models to add profiles.
The project currently has several transparent restrictions and special conditions.
The developer is deliberately in no hurry to make it Open Source: "This is a one-person project, and opening the code is a one-way door: you can't close it back. I'll have to handle compatibility, issues, and pull requests for devices that I don't have myself. I'd rather let the list of devices and analysis rules settle down first and consciously decide on a license than open it now and regret it later. In the meantime, the application is free for personal use — there are no restrictions on functions."
The survey occurs once every 60 seconds, which is a technical limit of the meter itself. Currently, one installation is designed for one meter.
The developer has been testing PowerTrace on a home Raspberry Pi for about 100 days in a row. The main practical achievement is a clear understanding of the real state of the power grid. According to him, in just one month of observations, 23 voltage dips below 200 V were recorded. In addition, the analytics helped identify a local problem: when powerful appliances are turned on, the voltage drops inside the apartment, which indicates the need to check the internal wiring.
You can learn more about the project and download the builds on the official website: getpowertrace.com .
