Silly Science » ethernet

Energy Monitoring

silly-scientist — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:37:45 +0000

Was at a friends today and he showed me an energy monitor that he had bought and was using to monitor his electricity supply. I was like “hmm… this could be something fun to attach to an XCore and get some graphs out of”.

My thought is to use my XC-3 (or maybe get an XC-2) to connect to an energy monitor receiver – or hack/make a receiver and then push the data somewhere useful via Ethernet. In fact I could combine it with my network monitor, ditch the screen and have it push the all the different types of data out into some nice pretty graphs. Anyway, enough brain dump – onto the hardware!

My proposal is to use a Current Cost Envi (CC128) device. There is a helpful CC128 write up from dale lane. It has several nice features:

The receiver has a RS232 output
The receiver outputs XML from the RS232
The system has support for up to 9 individual appliance monitoring (IAMs)

Some thoughts on software/graphing features:

Display a comprehensive history (device can output real-time, or 2hr block data)
Calculate some averages (particularly for time of day, month, season)
Plot electricity use vs. temperature? – the relationship should be pretty obvious… but I like pretty graphs
Plot the electricity generation stats and calculate my carbon footprint (ooh err!) – see Amee

Could even add some X10 stuff in there to… the possibilities are endless – watch this space!

Update: CC128 connector pinout- looks like you might be able to reprogram the internal PIC as well!

Embedded Traffic Monitor

silly-scientist — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:40:04 +0000

This is the initial release of the embedded traffic monitor which I implemented on an XMOS XC-3 development kit. It has a 256×32 VFD attached to it with a custom board that was designed from another application (hence the buttons/IR sensor you’ll notice if you are observant). Full source code is available from the embedded traffic monitor sourceforge page.

More information and pictures after the break…

The basic premise of the system is that data comes in and then goes out the other side (to general traffic the device looks like a wire) and information about that traffic collected on its way through (so at the moment it just looks at packet byte length). The data is then aggregated appropriately with the throughput being averaged over a second (sample at an interval of 100mS).

The information as well as being displayed on screen (via a simple I2C bus) is stored to an SPI flash once every 10s. This is so that if power is lost then the logged data is not.

Current Feature Summary:

Dual MII ethernet interface
I2C VFD for showing the resulting information
Saving of data to on-board SPI flash memory

Future features:

Internal switch for custom applications (so you can access the device over IP)
A web interface to allow a user to reset stored data and maybe produce a SVG graph?
Change display for lower cost, lower power OLED? (Farnell order code: 1498842)

And some pictures:

XC-3 Network Monitor and Display

Network Monitor Display showing a graph and data rates