Design and Development of a Multi-Channel Plug-in Type Wireless Data Logger for Energy Measurement

Abstract

Increasing demand of electrical energy and its rising prices have enforced the need of managing usage of electrical energy more efficiently. This requires regular monitoring of electrical appliances to timely identify inefficient energy consumption due to faulty conditions, inefficient designs, user negligence, etc. In this paper, design and development of a multi-channel wireless data logger is presented that aims to accurately measure the value of energy and related parameters like VRMS, IRMS and instantaneous power from more than one single phase application in real time. The proposed data logger is aimed to be low cost and to be a plug and play type device that can easily be introduced between mains and the appliance for energy monitoring. Data collected from various appliances are communicated to a central computer over a Bluetooth wireless link. The computer hosts a simple graphical user interface (GUI) based application that allows user to log the data as and when required. The proposed data logger is designed using CS5460A single phase bi-directional power/energy IC from Cirrus logic interfaced with AVR ATmega32 microcontroller. A wireless link between is established using AUBTM-20 Bluetooth modules from Austar Technology. Serial EEPROM is also included in the proposed design to store the data locally on the board for later use. GUI for the data logger has been designed using MATLAB. The works presented is a part of on going research towards development of a low cost Home Energy Management (HEM) system. 