18. Project Development¶
To reach the goal of having my own Energy Consumption Monitoring system I had to realize several steps as described below. The Gantt Chart and the table below will answer the following questions.
What tasks have been completed, and what tasks remain?
what's working? what's not?
what questions need to be resolved?
what will happen when?
what have you learned?
Initial Project planning¶
Here is a plan I prepared for my last weeks of Fabacademy to do the final project.
And here is the gantt filled along the time with the modification I had to bring due to some modification of the project. The most important one was that I thought I would adapt EmonLibCM (the library for current measurement) to the ESP32 ADC. Finally as explained in the Final project pages I kept the Atmegas for the current measurement.
It was a good thing for me to havethis plan prepared to be sure I would have time to reach all the goals I had.
Questions to be resolved¶
The questions are documented here : Questions to be answered
Creating the LuzMon¶
| Tasks | Compulsory ? | Status | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design a casing for the electronic | Yes | 100% | Some improvement can be brought to avoid stress on components during manipulation of the sensors. |
| Produce the Casing | Yes | 100% | I have printed it only with thick layers to go fast a would be interested in a better quality when I have more time |
| Design the electronic for current measurement | Yes | 100% | |
| Design the electronic for data management | Yes | 100% | |
| Produce the electronic | Yes | 100% | Not robust to manipulation |
| Learn how to use EmonLibCM | Yes | 100% | |
| Create the Software for data transfer | Yes | 100% | Nice thinking about data packaging. Could be improved no to use json. But at least the sensor name is done on the interface (raspberry) to avoid heavy json |
| Create the software for the OLED screen display | No | 10% | Tests were done but due to electronic issue it is not fonctionnal, it will be a second step |
| Create the interface on the raspberry Pi | Yes | 100% | I can see the data I wanted to see. Actual Power and cumulated consumed energy |
| Manage the database on the raspberry Pi | Yes | 50% | It works well when all data is valid, but has some bugs when some sensors are missing |
| Sensor calibration | Not for fabacademy, yes for me | 10% | I studied how to do and prepared a plan to do it thank to a calibrated power source |
| Test the device on a long period of time (>1month) for interface improvement | No | 0% | I hope to be able to do it starting from this summer |
For the future¶
To make it a complete project I would like to add the following features when I get the time to work on it :
- A fuse and thermo fuse for safety
- Automatic Wifi connection with WPS to avoid hard-coding passwords
- Extra autonomous plug to increase power discretization
- Cooling fan for electronics
- Create molded silicon insert for cable entry into the casing
- Work on reducing the number of clamps (they are a bit expensive) by bringing intelligence in the way data are analyed
This project was a really good occasion for me to learn how to start from an Idea and fight for it until the end in a really short amount of time with all the tools one needs to share what has been done.