Monitoring Power With A 555

[Diederich] is running a Raspberry Pi loaded up with Pimatic, a great home automation server that does just about anything you can throw at it. One thing it doesn’t do is monitor electricity and gas directly from the meter – you’re going to need hardware for that. [Diederich] stepped up to the plate and built that hardware using just a 555 timer. The total cost of adding this to his Pimatic setup was less than a dollar.

The 555 can be used as a timer, a trigger, and a bunch of them can be cobbled together into a CPU. [Diederich] isn’t using some fancy logic here; he’s just using the 555 as a Schmitt trigger with a phototransistor and his electricity meter. The output of the 555 is connected to the GPIO of the Raspberry Pi, and a Python script ties into Pimatic.

It’s a neat solution that only costs a dollar, and using the 555 has a few advantages: the 555 makes it possible to use long and thin wires back to the Pi, which means [Diederich]’s Pi doesn’t have to be located right next to his meter.

12 thoughts on “Monitoring Power With A 555

Leave a Reply to MystickCancel reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.