11  Building a Novel Smart Electrical Meter

This document describes the motivation, objectives and initial ideas for Project #2 of the Spring 2023 edition of the course. The projects are the cornerstone of the course, as they are what motivates all of the material that is discussed during the semester.

The project’s goal is to develop a computer system (hardware and software) that can monitor the electrical power usage of a section of the electrical power distribution system inside a building (e.g., at the main feed, sub-panel or individual circuit) and to leverage this information to support specific decisions by the building occupants or managers. These decisions need to be identified ahead of time by the project team, and can range from simple ones such as identifying base-load power consumption values, to more complex ones such as suggesting actionable steps to improve power quality or provide estimates of future power consumption under different scenarios.

There are various examples of projects (and commercially avaiable products) that can be used as a starting point. If you are curious to know more about them, a good place to start would be this (growing) list of links:

• EmonPi
• Split Single-Phase Energy Meter
  • Using the Split Single-Phase Energy Meter with RPi