With a different electric meter than most (because I generate electricity to the grid), I found a subscription service from a group called Smart Meter Texas (https://www.smartmetertexas.com). They email me the previous days’ usage and generation in a CSV file.
I’ve left these in my gMail with the intention of downloading them and start to pull data from them. Well, me being in IT, I started looking at a way to do that with a program.
A little smart googling and I found a guy on YouTube that walks through this – Jie Jenn – I started up Visual Studio Code and started following what he was doing. I saw quickly that he references a client token file in JSON format. I dug in the description, found how he made a google cloud app that allowed a passthrough to gMail.
So, here’s the steps:
- Setup a Google Cloud project
- Add the gMail api
- create an oAuth page
- allow my gmail account to access
From here, I could continue on and I got a client token JSON when I setup the oAuth connection. I followed the code and he even has a copy of it on his website. However, I didn’t want to save the attachments in Google Drive, but on my local hard disk. So, I started looking at other pages. I would up with a variant – I didn’t want to download EVERY attachment. So, I added code to filter for the start of the From for the Smart and if the file exists.
Here’s my completed code: GitHub
And here’s my CSVs!
Now, to decide a DB and tool to do the data crunching…