My current work revolves around building, maintaining a supporting a digital energy platform - and a large part of this involves processing electricity meter data (at great speed and scale.)
For fun - a conversation in the pub may have been involved - I built a similar system from scratch that used simulated meters, implemented with Raspberry Pi Pico computers : tiny little boards with Python and wifi for less than NZ$10.
Here’s a bigger Raspberry Pi 3B which acted as the head-end, managing the individual meters …
Here are a couple of headless Picos, which sat on my desk for several weeks, twinkling away and uploading simulated data every 5 minutes.
And here’s one of the several Grafana dashboards I built to track the system.
For fun I extended some of the Picos to have onboard displays : here’s one with an OLED display showing some values …
… and another with a nice LCD display allowing me to chart data.
Next stages involve scaling it up : larger numbers of Picos, automatically deployed and provisioned.