Energy use meter

So after reading this post, I got the idea to make a system that can measure EU flowing through a cable (mostly for SMP, to charge people for energy, but I'm sure are other uses).

It works by alternately charging and discharging a batbox/MFE/MFS. The picture shows it in the discharging phase - left is input and right is output (with an extra batbox for buffering). Because the batbox is charging half the time, the maximum average output is 16 eu/t (or 64 with MFE, or 256 with MFS).

At the bottom left is an output wire - I have it connected to a pulse former then a redstone engine, which moves a piece of dirt from one chest to another with every 40000 EU. That way, I could come back every now and then to see how much energy the customer has used and charge them for it.

Unfortunately, I don't see much use for this in the server I play on, because of its size (we have 10x10 town plots, and the town is the only place an electric company would be useful. Although as I was writing this I remembered RP2 devices can be vertical - the meters could possibly be built vertically under the 3-wide roads...

Edit: Forgot to mention - it needs a certain minimum amount of current flow or it will overcharge (further edit: overcharge as in charge too much money, not as in overcharge the batbox). If you feed, say, a single luminator from the output, current will stop flowing when it charges, making the circuit think the batbox is empty. There's no way around this as far as I can tell. A similar thing happens with the input. It will think the entire 40,000 EU has been transferred when really only one packet has.

I think that would be more easily done with a separate block - like the old Energy-O-Mat, but measuring energy instead of dispensing it. It would be like a transformer but would not change the voltage, and would come in LV, MV and HV variants. (and possibly EV?)

There should be a way to make it so only the person who placed it can access it. It also needs a reset button.

Quote from DanielPSp

Intresting design! And the redstone-engine setup for counting was an nice idea!

I think/got a feeling that AlbOS will have an feature to measure/count upwards from redstone pulses.
Create a powerplant, distrubution network, and a computer running albOS, charge people and terrify them with shuting down their power through a console

The redstone engine actually seems to miss most pulses, if it wasn't just a test world I'd change it to a transposer to make it actually work.

You don't need a computer to charge people with RP2. Set up "chest -> filter -> item detector -> chest" and an SR latch. When the EU meter pulses, reset the SR latch and pulse the filter. When the detector detects an item, set the SR latch. The SR latch would be connected to another splitter cable at the meter's input.

Edit:

Quote from alexthesax

Well I thought about it, and we already have on the list to make it so that batboxes ect. emit rs power when they are full, rather than the way it is now. Thus we can make a perfect eu meter, without too much trouble, and no glitches.

It needs a way to detect empty batboxes too. A perfect EU meter could be made with the current system, probably with a loop to guarantee power input and output.