Theory of Operation: The Energy Monitoring and Management System

There exists a problem in places where power is provided by a limited source, such as solar energy. There is no way to regulate the power consumption of its users. With no regulation, users can use an excess amount of power from the energy grid causing a depletion, or power outage, for the rest of those connected to the grid. The goal of this project is to design and implement a reliable, manufacturable, and expandable system to measure, display, and limit energy usage of a home or other facility. We are in Phase 4 of our project meaning there is a need to supply a functional and reliable modular meter to our client without focusing on unneeded additions at the moment. With this said, we first started with testing the results of our PCB changes made last semester. Then we had started working on using switching between the high and low frequency outputs of the energy metering IC to increase our accuracy. However, due to results found from both these goals and past issues with the power sensing, we decided to redesign the Power Sense Board utilizing waveform output for power measurement and pulse output for energy measurement. In addition, we concluded tests from the previous semester as well as creating test procedures for our design and manufacturing. To improve our testing, we created a long-term testing applet to automatically log data from our meter and our “gold standard” EKM meter. Finally, we increased efficiency of our user interface box manufacturing by creating a new process involving the CNC machine. Our project is developing our documentation for our detailed meter design and are in the process of completing this section of the project report as time allows