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A project log for Home Power Usage Monitor

Gather power data from the breaker panel and beam it to a Raspberry Pi for storage and web serving

drew-yenzerDrew Yenzer 07/09/2015 at 04:290 Comments

It took longer than I expected to get the initial project info in there, so this post will be brief. So far, I've got a schematic done up, PCB laid out, and BOM made. All the parts have even been ordered. I expect to receive the PCB in a couple weeks from OSH Park. Between then I'll have started writing the PIC code. Probably...

In my head, it's basically divided into 3 main sections:

1. ADC reads and power calculation

2. LCD Display

3. RF Transmission

I'll tackle it in that order as well. The RF transmission is last because I haven't quite decided how I want to handle that. MQTT looks interesting and definitely scale-able to work with other projects, but it might be too much overhead for the PIC. Plus I'd need to find a C library implementation of it. The alternative is to make my own quick and dirty protocol. It would be faster for me to implement and for the short term is all this project really needs. If I structure it right then it should be easy to switch protocols later on if need be.

Anyway that's all for now. I'll post the schematic, PCB, and BOM once I figure out a good way to do so.

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