WiFi Enabled Whole House Power Meter
The Open Hardware web community has made plenty of examples about power monitoring and consumption knowledge: from ladyada’s tweet-a-watt to Jarv’s Home power Monitoring. [Greg] shares code & circuits on his own power monitoring system based on Wifi Communication.
First things first – this project is a blatant and obvious rip-off of John Jarvis’ power monitoring project! A few minor details have changed but I have to give him credit for a great project idea. I was intrigued by John’s power meter and it gave me an excuse to buy and try an Arduino – a handy and fun little embedded project platform! John’s power meter uses the ethernet shield and some CGI scripts, etc., to talk with his server – I went with AsyncLabs WiShield to put my power meter onto the network – my backend to get the data to the server is also a bit different (but of course).
The basic idea of the project is that an Arduino Duemilanove is continuously reading the analog pins that a couple TED Current Tranducers are connected to (one per phase). The Arduino does a little smoothing/averaging of the data and waits for an IP connection to send that data out on. Another machine has a Win32 service running on it and every minute it queries the power meter for its current data; the data that is received is stuffed into a MySQL data base. When a web request comes in to view the data a few pre-canned charts are generated real time and returned to the web user’s browser.
via [SlackLab]
January 17th, 2011 at 05:15:53
Hmmm, I didn’t find theses projects when I googled a while back, I ended up building my own custom solution using an ATtiny85. I can read Volts, Amps, freq, and Power Factor off my mains.
http://www.billporter.info/not-so-tiny-power-meter/
I used $5 radios to beam the data out of the box, and currently it’s being displayed by a Arduino run LED marquee. I’m working on python scripts to send the data into the cloud.
January 28th, 2011 at 01:32:55
This is cool. I have been wanting to monitor my power like this.
January 28th, 2011 at 05:10:15
Great stuff. As one of apparently many amateurs working on this, I did a not too dissimilar implementation, with the following differences:
1) I used the ethernet shield instead of WiFi
2) I used the recent time utility library to have the Arduino connect to an NTP server to set it’s clock correctly and keep itself in synch
3) I collect data once per second, and then do a rolling archive of the last x seconds, the last y minutes and the last y hours of data in the Arduino RAM in case something happens to the client pulling the data, and implement a function to dump both historical and real time data to the client
4) I implemented delta pulse code modulation to compress the storage requirement in RAM on the Arduino
Like others that have done similar projects, I have a client program that polls the Arduino and logs the data in a database as well as doing graphing. Since I had a goal of learning Cocoa, as well, I wrote that client for the Mac, using an SQLLite Data Store under a CoreData framework, and implemented historical and realtime graphs as well.
And since I have a big Photovoltaic array on my roof, I capture data on both power generated and consumed on separate channels
If there’s any interest out there, I’ll try to get things in a state where they can be shared.
January 29th, 2011 at 19:05:46
How can we all get more info on the WiFi Enabled Whole House Power Meter?
Code, wiring, etc.
Thanks
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:22:49
Hi Tom,
You can get that kind of information from jarv’s site.
It’s not out-of-the-box, but Asynclab provides several example sketches, so once you set up everything locally it wouldn’t be difficoult to make it wireless.
Have a look at this post as well.
http://arduino.cc/blog/2010/09/30/open-energy-monitor-keeps-on-rocking/
thanks for commenting
Davide
February 3rd, 2011 at 10:38:29
Hi dougb.
Offcourse we are interested, please send ma a link and I may post it soon.
thanks for commenting,
Davide
February 3rd, 2011 at 14:05:45
Sorry for the long delay this comment had to wait to be published.
I apologize, Bill. I missed it under tons of comments that I try to moderate.
Cheers.
Davide
February 16th, 2011 at 00:02:08
Here’s a link with the Arduino code and the background for my 2 channel project. Also a screenshot of the OS/X logger/grapher.
http://randomamusements.blogspot.com/
April 28th, 2011 at 15:36:00
Hi guys, i absolutely need WiShield!!! I can’t find it here in Italy and Europe, can you help me? :-\
September 1st, 2011 at 18:09:03
[…] Whole house monitor (with WiFi). […]
February 22nd, 2016 at 11:20:44
can you provide me the following things about this project please
1)block diagram
2)components list