Category Archives: Projects

Power Monitor redesign

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

Over the last week or so, I have been side tracked by breaking dishwashers and clothes washing machines. But I have had some time to work on the redesign of the Power Monitor. Due to costs, I decided to give … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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

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 →

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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?

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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 →

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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

ADE7763 Part-11 (First Data Collection)

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Skye Sweeney

Tonight I moved the current sensor from my test load (150W light bulb) to a real circuit in my main distribution box. That circuit is currently pulling nearly 500W at 121Vrms. It is logging data to a CSV file. It … Continue reading →

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