Monitoring

11 Articles

Open Source Wireless Mesh Networking Energy Meter

March 28, 2011 by 35 Comments

[Jay Kickliter] writes in to tell us about his open source energy/power meter. With his buddy [Frank Lynam] they designed a small device that crams into existing power boxes and uses and 8 core propeller (P8X32A) microcontroller to perform true RMS voltage and current measurements using a current transformer. [Frank] and [Jay] don’t stop there. The meter also features an xbee pro 900 MHZ to provide wireless (and even mesh networking) capabilities to the whole ordeal.

[Jay and Frank] estimate a total unit cost of around $80 (US) per prototype. With volume the price goes down by about half. With a larger number of units, and the magic of mesh networking, we could see cheaper xbee’s driving the cost down some. Check out the Google code page for details or the schematic (pdf) if you are interested.

So far the project is in the beta stages, and only features a single module sending data to a PC running an OS X Cocoa application. [Jay] is about to be otherwise occupied by the Merchant Marines and [Frank] the Navy, so they figured we could have a go at it for awhile.

We have seen other hardware used to monitor power consumption, but cramming this circuit into each power box is a neat idea.

[Frank] explains the whole project in the video after the jump.

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Simple Household Status System

February 18, 2011 by 20 Comments

The-Household-Informer

[BrianH] decided that he no longer wanted to venture outside on cold or rainy days just to check if the mail had come, so he built himself a notification system that would alert him if the postman had stopped by. Additionally, he admits to being forgetful on occasion and wanted a way to monitor whether or not he forgot to close the garage door. His Instructable details how he accomplished both of these tasks with the household monitor he built around an ATmega168. His project uses a mailbox mounted photoresistor to determine when the mailbox has been opened, and a reed switch that is triggered when the garage door has been opened. If either of these things occur, a beep is emitted from his notifier, and the appropriate status LED is lit. Simply monitoring whether the garage door has been opened is not all that helpful, so he programmed his notifier to beep persistently at 10-minute intervals if the garage has been left open for more than an hour.

His hack is pretty useful, but he does mention that there is an inordinate amount of wiring that needs to be laid, citing his driveway repaving as a great opportunity to do so.

Clamp Sensor Power Monitoring

December 21, 2010 by 45 Comments

[Bill Porter] has joined in the pursuit of an inexpensive yet effective way to monitor his power usage. He calls his project the Not So Tiny Power Meter, and shared both his successes and follies involved in seeing it through to implementation. There are problems; sizing issues with enclosures and his PCB, issues with noise when measuring low-current signals with the clamps, and even some wireless communications issues. But it looks like he’s got the system running despite these hurdles. Right now it streams data wirelessly so that he can display the current energy consumption, but he plans to add Google Power Meter functionality next.

We’ve seen commercial units using the same sensing principles that have been hacked to show data online.

1-Wire HVAC Monitoring System

July 29, 2009 by 10 Comments

1-wire hvac control

The 1-Wire HVAC monitoring system is for residential Geothermal HVAC systems. This project utilizes the so called 1-wire temperature sensor. A single board computer handles the brunt of the work including web accessible trend data. With access to the underling temperatures, the over all system performance may be gauged. Earlier this year we covered a HVAC web enabled monitor that adds an element of control. As the industry adopts modern control architectures, we hope to see more HVAC hacks around.