Combining PowerCalc with HASS Agent

[dxmnkd316]

This isn't really a feature request so much as a potentially interesting idea for Powercalc users. I recently discovered HASS Agent. I've been playing around with the Performance Counters in Windows and discovered there are a wealth of power sensors available in Windows directly! Socket, CPU, GPU, etc.

I've been playing with various combinations and looked at various CPU loads and compared calculated power vs. a real power measuring device. Here are my results looking at stressing the computer and relaxing the load:
Blue is calculated and purple is real.

I think that's decent enough to remove the physical power meter from my computer and move it elsewhere.

Perhaps it's possible to get closer to actual loads from some well thought out combination of sensors: GPU, CPU, memory, HDD, USB, etc. But my 10-minute stab seems to pretty consistent. I'm probably missing the USB and a few other minor users from my list of sensors, which would explain why it's a few watts lower, on average. Not sure Windows or my hardware really measure that. Would be kind of nice to find a total system use, but I suspect that's not available either.

This is all probably going to vary depending on what manufacturer and model are for your CPU, GPU, and motherboard.

Anyways, something interesting I thought I'd share.

edit: Oh, and it also has energy meters as well, not just power. From what I can tell, they're supposed to be given in picowatt-hours, but that didn't really match with my actual usage. It was significantly higher. So more experimentation is needed.

[bramstroker]

Thanks for sharing your expirements. This is definitely interesting. Cool to see where people come up with using powercalc possiblities.

What do you mean with picowatt-hours? The energy sensors create with powercalc? Those are by default in kWh

[dxmnkd316]

Glad to help.

Regarding the picowatt-hours, this was the reading provided by Windows' internal sensors. Sorry for the confusion.
Below is the reading I got from the APU sensor within Windows:

I googled it to see if it was an even remotely useful or what units it was in and eventually found this documentation:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/powermeter/energy-meter-interface

I converted to kWh and made it its own sensor. But it wasn't clear when that counter started - at reboot, perhaps? Since I didn't want to spend the time to figure out the reset cycle, I just combined the power sensors in Watts (as opposed to energy sensors in pWh) in Home Assistant and let Powercalc do the energy calcs to give kWh.

[bramstroker]

@dxmnkd316 reviving old discussion here ;-). Could you elaborate about how did you find the correlation between CPU and power and got the right calibration values?
I assume you used linear strategy from powercalc with calibration values?

[dxmnkd316]

SOrry for the delay.

I didn't actually base it on the % load on the CPU or GPU. In Windows the power consumption is measured directly (or indirectly) and can be found using the Performance Monitor application. There are other ways to find them (various CPU and GPU utilities like HW Monitor and GPU-Z.

As for which sensors to pick, it was a bit of guess and check. I knew the CPU and GPU would be the biggest users so I grabbed those first from the Performance Monitor performance counters list. I couldn't find anything that related to USB, RAM, or SSD. In the end, for my specific laptop, I ended up going with:

(Listed as Category / Counter / Instance )

• GPU: NVIDIA GPU / Power Consumption mW / For instance I selected the "#0" but you should select whatever card you have. There may be multiple, each will require adding a separate sensor to HASS Agent.
• Socket: Energy Meter / Power / VDDCR_SOC Power
• RAPL: Energy Meter / Power / RAPL_Package0_PKG

Notes:

• All of the values are given in milliwatts from what I understand. In the graph from Windows they are scaled to Watts.
• For the GPU I had really weird spikes that made zero sense. So I had to do a basic filter where if the value was greater than 100000 mW, it would just substitute 2.5 W instead. Otherwise it would take the GPU power value in mW. Not ideal but I couldn't figure out why the GPU sensor was giving clearly impossible values.
• Since I have a laptop, I also used the IP address from the network adapter to determine if I'm at home or away. I don't want to count power if I'm at work and plugged in. So if I'm not at home, the total power is 0 W.
• It's possible I might be double counting things with the three sensors listed above. RAPL should have taken care of the CPU and RAM, but the socket should have as well I think... Either way, the numbers lined up either because they aren't double counting or by coincidence. I don't have a way to measure USB, SSD, peripherals, RAM, etc.

It might be possible to do a CPU % vs. Power comparison, but I'm not sure how accurate that would be.

[dxmnkd316]

Oh and I could never quite get the energy numbers to make sense so I just use Powercalc to log the power and integrate for energy.