Author Archives: Skye Sweeney

Sticker shock

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

I started making a bill of materials (BOM) for the power monitor and realized that each node was likely to cost $30 or more.  With 30 nodes to make, I am looking at a $900 in parts. Perhaps I need … Continue reading →

Posted in Home Energy Monitor, Projects | 4 Comments

Design pretty much done with design!

Posted on March 18, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

I got a good chunk of time in the lab this weekend to pretty much nail down the design for the Power Monitor. I now have two sensor nodes on breadboards connected to an Arduino reporting data back to a … Continue reading →

Posted in ADE7763, Components, Home Energy Monitor, PIC, Processors, Projects | 5 Comments

Programming PICs

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

Last few evenings I have had a few minutes to start programming my 16F627A PIC. So far I have been sucessful in reading and writting IO pins and using the external interrupt. Although my PIC does not support the debugger, … Continue reading →

Posted in Home Energy Monitor, PIC, Processors, Projects | Comments Off on Programming PICs

PICKit-3 and the 16F627A

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

Saturday I spent the whole day getting my wife’s sewing machine running again. Sunday morning was spend on domestic jobs. Sunday evening I got some time to start back on the the Energy Monitor project. First thing I did was … Continue reading →

Posted in Furnace Monitor, Projects | 1 Comment

Adjusting the timing of an industrial sewing machine

Posted on March 9, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

My wife has an industrial sewing machine used for quilt making. Over the last few days it has started to act up. Last night and tonight I have been working on the machine adjusting the timing rather than doing any … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments

A few steps forward

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

This weekend I was able to spend some time in the lab. I got the Arduino to ADE7763 interface cleaned up and working using the hardware SPI peripheral. This greatly increases the speed that I can access ADE registers. I … Continue reading →

Posted in Home Energy Monitor, Projects | Comments Off on A few steps forward

2 Steps back 2 steps forward over 1 week

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

I tried to migrate the ADE7763 chip from bit-banged SPI to the HW peripheral in the Arduino. Should have been easy right?

Posted in Home Energy Monitor, Projects | Comments Off on 2 Steps back 2 steps forward over 1 week

NIOS2 FPGA work

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

At work I got assigned to write a very simple control system for a device we are making a prototype of. For various reasons, the designers choice to use an FPGA with a soft-core processor. What this means is that … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal, Projects, Software | Comments Off on NIOS2 FPGA work

Swamped at work

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

Having to take a small break from the fun stuff as I am swapped at work. Hope to be back in a week.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Swamped at work

Power meter design-2

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

I think I decided that the easiest and simplest solution to the chip select problem is to use a small PIC processor to receive a serial data block with the address that the master processor wants to talk to. If … Continue reading →

Posted in Home Energy Monitor, Projects, Uncategorized | 6 Comments