Efficient Energy Monitoring with 2Smart Standalone: Integrating Schneider Electric Devices and Teltonika Gateways

Table of contents:

Project details

Timeframe

• Estimate – 3 days.
• Actual delivery – 2 days.

Industry

• Industrial IoT.
• Smart energy.
• Energy management.

Services

• Platform development.
• Data aggregation and visualization.
• System integration.
• Consulting and support.

The Brief

A company just entering the IoT equipment monitoring market faced the challenge of setting up an energy consumption monitoring solution for its clients. To address this, they selected Schneider Electric IEM3255 meters and partnered with Teltonika, using their devices to configure the Modbus bus for connected meters. However, despite having the necessary hardware, they lacked a software platform to collect, aggregate, and visualize data. Seeking a solution, they reached out to 2Smart on Teltonika’s recommendation to request an integration for this equipment and a platform for monitoring and reporting. With our prior experience working with Teltonika and their IoT networking equipment, we were able to jump into the project quickly without the need for additional research and development.

Challenge

The client’s primary objective was to monitor and aggregate energy data from their meters to facilitate accurate billing for their end users. The specific requirements they presented to 2Smart included:

1. Monitoring energy consumption metrics from Schneider Electric devices by reading data from the meters over the Modbus bus using a Teltonika TRB245 gateway.
2. Aggregating data and displaying it over different time intervals (hourly, daily, and weekly) to generate reports and invoice end-users for energy consumption.
3. Storing historical device data for at least three months to support analysis and reporting.
4. Providing secure, restricted access to data exclusively for authorized users while maintaining convenient platform accessibility.

This solution included plans to configure platform access via a secure public URL, as requested by the client. Although our platform supports both private and public access methods, we were prepared to implement the public URL option to align with their preference for straightforward accessibility.

Solution

To address these requirements, we proposed the 2Smart Standalone IoT monitoring and automation platform, which comes “ready out of the box” with all the necessary tools for data monitoring and aggregation. This platform is equipped to collect, store, and visualize historical sensor data from connected devices. Notably, by the time the client approached us, we already had experience visualizing data sourced from the Teltonika gateway.

Although 2Smart Standalone is often deployed locally — for example, in smart homes, industrial sites, or agricultural facilities — it’s equally suitable for cloud deployment on a virtual server. For this project, we used a virtual private network through OpenVPN to securely connect physical devices to the cloud instance, ensuring reliable data transmission and remote access to monitoring.

Thus, the steps needed to meet our client’s objectives were straightforward:

• Deploy a cloud instance of the monitoring and automation platform.
• Connect the equipment to the platform’s MQTT broker.
• Configure the necessary graphs and tables for analyzing data from the energy meters.

Password-protected access to the platform interface is a built-in feature of 2Smart Standalone, which includes separate access levels: an admin dashboard for device configuration and automation setup, and a user dashboard for telemetry monitoring and sensor control.

Since our client was just entering the market with this project, we agreed to launch under a Proof of Concept (PoC) approach, minimizing risks for all parties:

• For the client — reduced initial costs.
• For their end-users — assurance that the system would meet their needs.
• For 2Smart — limited overhead for platform support and configuration.

We outlined a clear division of responsibilities:

Our client’s responsibilities:

• Managing communication and alignment on business requirements with end-users.
• Setting up the Teltonika gateway and configuring data transmission from sensors to the MQTT broker of the 2Smart Standalone cloud instance.

2Smart’s responsibilities:

• Providing guidance on configuring the Teltonika gateway to ensure efficient sensor data transmission.
• Setting up sensor data visualization and building historical trend graphs.

Results

Once the Schneider Electric IEM3255 meter was connected to the Teltonika TRB245 gateway via the Modbus bus and data transmission from the gateway to the MQTT broker of the 2Smart Standalone cloud instance was configured, we achieved a device card on the platform’s dashboard displaying real-time telemetry.

Here are the services we integrated to meet the client’s requirements:

• Certbot — a tool for generating and automatically renewing SSL certificates for the platform’s cloud instance.
• Grafana — a robust, free tool for visualizing historical data.
• TRB245 GW (MQTT Adapter Service) — a script for converting data from the Teltonika gateway into the 2Smart Standalone format.

Here’s how the manually configured dashboards look in the native 2Smart Standalone interface, providing real-time device data monitoring:

Here’s how the historical data tables and graphs appear in Grafana:

The table below contains data for the daily calculation of energy consumption. As shown in the screenshot, this is a straightforward task. To calculate the energy used, we simply take the first and last readings from the meter for the corresponding day and compute the difference.

Notes on the Influx query in the screenshot above:

• “GROUP BY time(1d, -4h)” — we group all sensor data for the day with a 4-hour offset to account for the client’s time zone, ensuring the table displays values starting from 00:00 each day.

The screenshot below demonstrates how the Transform rule is configured to calculate the third column of the table, showing the energy consumption for the day.

The tasks set by our client were completed in two days, despite the teams being in different cities and communicating remotely via the Internet. In fact, without geographical separation, this work could have been completed in a few hours, but remote collaboration inevitably caused some minor delays.

Key Takeaways

During the project implementation, 2Smart Standalone once again proved its versatility and flexibility, successfully solving the client’s challenges in a short period. It’s important to note that the platform is not dependent on specific hardware manufacturers — instead of the Teltonika gateway and Schneider meter, any other devices can be used, allowing seamless integration with various hardware and easy adaptation to unique business requirements.

Although this case was limited to a Proof of Concept deployment, the project can be easily scaled in the future by adding new devices and data sources without unnecessary costs or delays. Other use cases, such as smart greenhouses or advanced smart homes based on 2Smart Standalone, show that the platform handles a large number of connected devices effectively, including when using various IoT protocols beyond Modbus.

In addition to the web interface deployed in the described case, system administrators and users on 2Smart Standalone can also use the 2Smart Cloud mobile app for telemetry monitoring and device management. This integration is free and can be set up in just 10 minutes.

If you’re looking for a reliable IoT solution for monitoring and automation that adapts to your business needs and easily integrates with new hardware, contact the 2Smart team at contact@2smart.com and schedule a demo of our solutions.