building a power outage alert notification:
We will build a device to notify us in case of a power outage in our home. For that we just need to re-purpose a GSM tracker.
Post-scriptum: do not waste any time on the Orange Pi 2G IoT.
While the idea and the hardware sound nice, after working a bit with it, there are just too many issues:
the official Linux distributions are old (> 1 year), the kernel is even older (it still is a 3.10)
the serial port is unstable (freeze on overrun)
the wifi is very unstable
the wifi MAC changes at every boot
the battery managment actually does not work at at all (no power and no charging due to a mistake in the design)
real power vs. apparent power:
We all know voltage times current is power, real power, but don't forget the time component since the RMS values will only give you apparent power, and this is by a power factor different.
my custom wireless electricity meter:
While renewing my distribution board the land lord decided to remove the electricity meter. Now I can't note how much electricity I am using. So I decided to build and install my own electricity meter: the spark counter.
Using a cheap power meter (i.e. peacefair PZEM-004), a microcontroller (i.e. Arduino Nano 3.0), radio transceivers (i.e. nordic nRF24L01+), a single board computer (i.e. Raspberry Pi), and some storage and visualization tools (i.e. influxDB and grafana) I am now able to measure, log, and monitor my electricity consumption.
warning: the electricity meter I am presenting will only work for 1 phase 2 wires power distribution systems. I have a 3 phases 4 wires system and I am doing it wrong.
