HOME ENERGY MONITOR
Website for Aidan Byrne's Final year project entitled
"To develop a mobile app and monitoring device to successfully monitor electrical energy usage".
PROJECT OVERVIEW AND COMPONENTS
BRAINS OF THE OPERATION
A Raspberry Pi micro-computer was used as the main component of the energy monitor. Python code was run on the Raspberry Pi to collect the current data from the current sensor, process this data and upload the useful processed data up to the Xively online database
PEAK DETECTOR CIRCUIT
A peak detector circuit was necessary as the output of the CT current sensor was a waveform and only the peaks of this waveform needed to be used as part of the energy monitor
XIVELY ONLINE DATABASE
A Xively database was set up as a place to store all current and apparent power readings. The Raspberry Pi uploads this data to the datastream where this data can be viewed live or historical data can be viewed in convenient graphs.
CT CURRENT SENSOR
A LEM Current Transducer was used to collect current usage data for the energy monitor. This current sensor was attached to an extension cable so that there would not be a need to wire it up to every device that we wanted to monitor individually. The current of any device plugged into the extension cable could then be monitored
ANALOG TO DIGITAL CONVERTER
An analog to digital converter was needed as the Raspberry Pi computer is an all digital computer and the analog voltage output of the peak detector circuit needed to be converted into a digital 8-bit number in order to be read in by the Raspberry Pi. An ADC-0804-LCN analog to digital converter chip was used to achieve this
USE ENERGY MONITOR
Lets you use the Xively home energy monitor database to see realtime power usage data if the energy monitor is connected or else to view historical data
