The Best Power Monitoring System - Arduino: Voltage, Current, Power Factor, Phase Angle, etc

in today's video I'll be giving you a technical rundown of an Arduino based power monitoring system I've built for the lab that can measure voltage current power factor phase angle apparent power and real power [Music] [Applause] Oh welcome back to the lab in today's video we're going to be taking a brief look at the labs power monitoring system of designing books so when I'll start envisioning the lab I wanted to have some sort of system that would monitor and measure all the power coming in for two reasons one because it's important to know how much current were drawing because if we're drawing too much power into the lab from whatever experiments or project and running they could obviously trip breakers or overload the system and number two because the project itself would be fun to do don't involve electrics because it's dealing with mains voltages and main currents try it because it would deal with low voltages turn to the lightest targets and Sigma and of course programming because in order to capture the data approach that set of presenter on the screen or recording on a database that have to be some programming involved now all those three things I'm interested in because that's my internet so it would be a fun project to do so this here is the main power cabinet vlog part enters through the solid cable down here and inside there are the different parts for the different circuits including the circuit breakers and fuses now this is a very big cabinet even for this lab but it's much bigger than the houses maintenance human unit and that's because we got this free it was being thrown away from a local public building so for months while using rather than having to buy one and it also gives us enough space to house other projects including the power monitoring which are going to a bit more detail in a moment but usually we wouldn't need a cabinet as heavy duty as this it was three-phase they did used to say for 15 volts obviously I had to change that so let's get into the hardware behind the power monitoring system so the most important part really is this here it's the O LED screen is what presents the information being recorded and measured in calculators and I'll show you a close-up of that in a moment if we open up the cabinet you can see all the hardware involved this side is the hardware required for the circuits of the lab so you have the fuses and circuit breakers the bus bars and the main isolator here which allows you to shut off all the power to the life of the event of an emergency now that's we've been there for eight it has been there since power first rounds of this lab but about a year ago now and of course all of this was empty space because it doesn't need anymore like I said this was for a big public building with many more circuits in fact when we got this cabinet that was full with components which are reused and recycled for this project now there's actually two things going on in there there's the power monitoring and there's a backup power system which is a UPS system I built and integrated into here I'll kick in if there's ever a power cut and provide power to the lights and wall sockets stuff like that I'll go into detail on that in a separate video pieces is set the project but they share the same blood soaked on really do this video without mentioning it now the heart of the system is this thing right here that's not do we know nano and that is what controls the entire bucket power and power monitoring system cables from the arduino nano connect to the hardware that measure the parameters we want to measure including voltage from the current and the power factor and then cables come off from here run to the cabinet door and then go to the screen now let's have a quick look at the actual circuit diagram for the system I don't know do a close-up of the actual components involved and go into a few more details on how system actually operates okay so we come over to the second white board here because I already have the circuit diagram drawn out when I'm actually designing and implementing the project now you ignore everything on this side is that's about power like I said up in the next video released in that we taught it so there's three main systems here and I put them in three different colors to make that clear the audrina sits in the center and that does all the data processing over here we have the mains power coming straight in from the armored cable that you saw and that likes the lights on the front panel that says Caroline that just shows that there's power entering the cabin on is live so you obviously don't touch anything unless you turn the power off now we're measuring primarily three different parameters with this payment system the voltage the currents and the power factor and I decided to do this because I wanted to have the best power monitoring system available so I controversially named this video the best power monitoring system and I've done that for two reasons number one because before I was making that's when I started making this I wanted to look at what other people have done before so I could come up with ideas of how I make my own power monitoring system and I think this is the best stuff the ones I've seen on YouTube number two this system measures every parameter really you could want from a power monitoring system went to great lengths to make sure it could do that so all the data need is even if it isn't right even if it's not that important right now it's being measured and reported it can be used in the future so we've got a voltage circuit up there that measures the voltage coming in and that should stay you know around 240 volts it fluctuates a bit the current system measures the amount of current being drawn arguably the most important so much of them so we can make sure we don't overload any systems and we can make sure we're not using too much power the final system down here in the green that measures the power factor and that works by measuring the phase angle and the power factor value between 0 1 and both of those are presented on the screen using the voltage and current you can work out the power the apparent power using the power factor system in conjunction with these two you can work out the real part and then you can work out the reactive power so from the system you can calculate all the values that are needed in regards to power monitoring so the system is semi complicated but I'll try and break it down so appear for the voltage you simply have a step-down transformer to lower the voltage to about 10 volts and a potential divider because the Arduino analog input pins can't handle the high voltage at new speed between 0 & 5 so you tend toward about that down and that just goes into one of the alkyl pins there's a little bit more complicated than that as a few diodes in there to stop makes it voltage didn't use the Zener diodes in the end for various reasons and these resistors are entirely correct because this was the first draft I changed it as a built it and they're just at this diagram there but it's more or less the same you get the idea the current measurement system is similar instead of having a step-down voltage transformer we actually have a current transformer which is just a single winding I already had a load of those built from a ton of current experience that I ordered that I'm actually use yeah a burden resistor for the current transformer and then we take that value and simply put it again it's one of the other markets now for the current transformer the voltage coming out of it is actually extremely low to learn about the vaults which is enough for the arduino to handle make its voltages so we don't need any die as that and again didn't use the Zener die now the power factor system is a bit more complicated because I've never really done much work with on balance before I didn't come up with this design myself I found this online I'll link in the description because this sort of video on youtube and first we made this documented this works really well so I'm really happy with that I don't have any problems with it so far so thank you to wherever you are to come up with that design I'm not obviously not going to take credit for it so like I said it's a bit more complicated this involves logic gates and off balance but the basic idea is you take one input from the voltage measurement system and you take one but from the current measurement system and compare them because the power factor for those who don't know it's simply the source a measure of how efficient your system is and how much real power is being used for how much power is being wasted to create magnetic fields and things such as motors and other inductive loads and what that does is it causes a phase shift between the voltage and current waveforms because these are both sine waves if you have more of an inductive or capacitive load on the system or just a reactive loads being drunk on this mains that AC supply then these two waveforms are going to become Faiers and whether it's in whether the voltage leads a light spends other Socrative or inductive night regardless this measurement is taken by getting current getting voltage and comparing them and that's what these lot pumps do here they're acting our zero crossing detectors these dials are clumping dialects and the output this is described it's essentially a 1 when the voltage is above zero and this happens to one with the current is above to those two going to an XOR gate and the XOR gate will obviously this is a logic gate we'll compare these two and four values only an output output one when any one of these is on so both of them are on Bobby now when I put if neither of them are on they'll be not but both one of them is on exclusively there'll be a logical worn-out put it which is just +5 volts that is read by the r3 now it's up to be on the digital parallel manner and what it basically does is it measures the pulse it measures how long that is on for because these waveforms are perfectly in phase then these will both be on at the same time and there will be no pulse if these waveforms are out of phase then there we are lag between the time and this comes on time when this comes on and so the pulse will be longer the Arduino simply takes that measurement looks at the time and looks at the delay and through a bit of mathematics calculates phase angle and calculates the path back for this value between 0 1 then you can take those information put it all together why can't your power your power power your real power your reactive power know what information is presented on the screen and that's about it so it's a fairly in-depth system and it did take a while to get it from running after Bill each of these individual a debug them test them and calibrate them however there are problems because when I put these all three together connected to the same system is of course you've now got this power factor system connected to the voltage system and connected to the current system they didn't all behave nicely they actually interfere with each other I had to use a second current transformer for the power factor system so again this diagram isn't perfect it's not completely accurate for this we get the message it's most of the way about but the system works now in the end I've got it all worked in five and of course we've got all calibrated because once you've got this measurement that the current and the voltage then you've got representation of the value you have no doubt to life to need to do a bit of regression analysis so this is data processing and basically found that constant proportionality that relates values coming in from the current system from voltage system to the actual and current voltage being recorded and it's failure so let's take a look at the hardware involved in the system in greater detail so this is the front panel you could ignore all this this is for the backup power this here's the panel live light which is on if there's electricity running into the system that's always on unless the isolator switch is triggered down there but that's for emergencies so here you can see the data being presented and updated in real time on the first line we have the voltage and that's UK moon's voltage you can then see the current draw in amps I didn't have enough space on the screen to put the unit but the unit is self-explanatory anyway ap is your parent power so that is simply your voltage times recurring RP is your reactive power so that is your voltage times your current times the power factor which is the value between zero and one power factor is on the line below local PF the a is the phase angle so there Derek directly related by a cosine below that is information for the backup power system so that's the backup battery and the saves as the back of power again nor those bottom lines that's gonna be the next video well upgrade I want to measure the system in the future is to have all this information logged so some point I wanna have a server in here that will serve a multitude of functions but one of those would be a database system and what I want to do is want to take all this data are the wireless state or for a cable that will run out the top of X into the trunk and you can't say but the string that goes around all of the love and then that will go down to the server and it will store all this information and then it can graph it it's a how much power you're using when but what you can also do is take the power the real power of the amount are used over past 24 hours and actually multiply that by the price of electricity and then actually work out how much money you've spent per day we have that on our smart meter in the house but this would be specifically for the lab are not be nice to know because we do use a lot of code so again on the left side we have all the systems required just for the circuits here in the lab we have the mains power come in through the isolate switch down there that then troubles up to breakers well for the fuses first then through the breakers and then there's a bus pass there those growing cables at the sides the twin unearths there the mains the mains cables coming from the license circuit from the plugs they weren't directly into those bus bars for neutral and ground that's that's all for just getting the power here in the lab working this system here is back about and the power monitoring so right in the center with the arduino nano that's the heart of it all the program on there is running all the data processing presenting the information to the screen and capturing the data from the measurement devices so that there is the voltage transformer that simply just connected to the mains and that gets the voltage and stepped it down that connection up there that's just a series of terminal strips that allow for easy maintenance of taking components out putting new ones in if they're break about ease out a lot of debugging the system so that's just connections that's all what's going on up there but reading from the voltage transformer sent to a voltage divider which you can see from those resistors there and then goes through the blue wire to an analog pin on the Arduino now up at the top you can see we have two current transformers that's a contactor ignore that for now that's for the backup power but we have one code transformer for just measuring the current and one for power factor it's like I said on how to use separate ones those just go through the terminal strip down to burden resistors again on this breadboard and I'm using this protoboard for a variety of functions of actually got separated in the back these components all aren't connected to each other I'm just using it as a one board that'll do many things so after burn the resistors on there and again those signals to speak directly into the Nano and then finally we take the other movie output from the other character and smaller and as you probably guessed those two chips there one is the op-amp chip quad up and the other one is the it's all gates we have couple of resistors and the the diodes the clamping diodes wiring and there are also a series of capacitors I forgot to mention on the circuit diagram there just for filtering out noise in any AC ripple you can also see some electrical bits and ceramics right up there again just so fills out any noise so the logic values are read correctly yeah oh that just again feeds directly into the Arduino and that's it so it's a lot of wires it's quite messy but it works and now that it's installed it doesn't actually need to be touched the Arduino itself gets its power from that little USB from that little step-down transformer there again just an AC adapter that I took apart and used for this because those are charter that I don't need anymore that USB can be substituted for connection to a computer if we need to reprogram it but because it's the programs done it doesn't need touching the system could just be left hires finally that information once it's all processed exits through a series of these colored wires up into the connection strip at the top then down through the side to the door where the screen is on screen is held on by those bolts there and the information is presented to the screen in terms of accuracy the system's more or less there the current can vary between plus or minus half an amp which are knows quite considerable but really the current measurement is there so we can see if we're drawing a lot of current or if we're drawing hardly an age and also if we're going over a certain amount and to be honest it performs well enough what I need I remember the system is a microprocessor it's an arduino nano it can do all sorts of calculations so if I really wanted to I could sit down for a long time and get it really perfectly tuned for each and that travels through it it can take a different reading and do use a different constant proportionality to work out the actual cone and that could get really really accurate but again I just don't really see the point in spending a long time tuning that and carefully calibrating it because it performs its function well enough it does the job intended and as in terms of the power factor I've noticed that working very well whenever I plug in say a transformer the phase angle goes up the lots when whenever a resistive load on system such as a castle the phase angle reduces considerably I don't actually have a power factor like measurement device don't have anything like that on any my multimeters so I can't actually see how accurate it is but from first simple principles it seems to be accurate enough okay everyone I hope you enjoyed this was just a short video to give a technical rundown my power monitoring system how it works and the circuit diagrams behind it if you want to try and build one himself you can use the diagrams that presented as a base but remember those were not official the values on that but my initial graph to change things in practice watch out the next video where I'll be talking about the batterer power which is arguably a lot more interesting than this because this is just a screen some numbers on the end of the day but the power school because it provides the entire level powerful mysterious buttresses deserver a power curve or a break the trip or anything that allows the server that will be in here about related to keep running in the event of power so thanks for watching if you've got any questions any technical questions regarding any of this [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Halfcorp

Views: 35,570

Keywords: Halflife390, Halflife, lab, workshop, build, work, shop, tesla, coil, geek, group, voltage, electronics, electric, tutorial, arduino, corp, half, half.corp, halfcorp, project, vlog, video, log, science, technology, laboratory, engineer, engineering, power monitoring, power, monitor, current, power factor, factor, phase angle, phase, angle, nano, arduino nano, system, power system, monitoring system, current transformer, voltage transformer

Id: H4blakSddmk

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2018