In the course of the Smart* project, we have developed some Linux-based software tools to enable easy interaction with commodity sensing equipment. Some of the building blocks of our sensing deployment are available for download here.
Many of our sensors are Insteon powerline-based devices. The Insteon energy meter is the iMeter Solo, which does not ship with any easily scriptable software. Our plmtools-imeter software (a fork of the plmtools project) provides one-line querying capabilities of iMeter Solos (via a USB connection to an Insteon PLM).
plmtools-imeter
$ insteon meter my-lamp-imeter
17
Our deployment also includes Z-Wave devices, which communicate wirelessly at higher bandwidths than Insteon, but are more complicated to interact with using OpenZWave. Our Z-Wave reader script simplifies polling one or more Aeon Labs Smart Energy Switches in round-robin fashion at any specified interval.
zwmeter
$ zwmeter /dev/ttyUSB0 1000
meter1 24 ... | ... meter2 37 ... | ... meter1 24 ...