Open-Source Energy Monitoring Hardware

OpenEnergyMonitor hardware: raspberry pi, emonTX
 and emonGLCD

In our smart microgrid laboratory at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt we need to be able to measure energy flows at different places in the network. Our criteria had been to be able to measure power, current, and voltage with adjustable measurement time intervals. The meters should be networked wirelessly with a visualisation possibility via an embedded device or a web page. In order to implement appropriate measurement strategies (for example measuring with a time-triggered architecture) the system should be fully programmable, in other words open-source. 

emonCMS web-app visualization tool

To meet this requirements we decided to use the OpenEnergyMonitor. It provides a metering board emonTx, which is based on Arduino and communicates to some base station. This can be either a own-built base station emonBase from OpenEnergyMonitor or the nowadays trendy Raspberry Pi. All necessary software is provided and easy to use. The OpenEnergyMonitor also provides an energy visualisation tool called emonCMS, which can be installed on the Raspberry Pi. It can be used for processing, logging and visualizing energy. Like the other software also the emonCMS is open source.

Links:

• Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-sized embedded computer running Linux
• OpenEnergyMonitor, open-source energy monitoring tools
• A. Monacchi, D. Egarter, W. Elmenreich. Integrating Households into the Smart Grid. Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems, Berkeley, CA, May 2013.
• W. Elmenreich, G. Bauer, and H. Kopetz. The time-triggered paradigm. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Time-Triggered and Real-Time Communication Systems, 2003.