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spark_abacus

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The spark abacus is a custom electricity meter monitoring system. It's a follow-up of the spark counter, but for a 3-phase 4-wire mains electricity power distribution installation.

electricity meters

For the spark abacus I am using several electricity meters. This just evolved over time as I wanted to try different technologies, but one (set) of them is sufficient to complete the task.

peacefair PZEM-004T

The pacefair PZEM-004T is an inexpensive single phase electricity meter.

PZEM-004T module, front side PZEM-004T module, circuit PZEM-004T module, back side

Connect mains electricity (AC) and the current sensing coil (put around the wire going to the load to monitor) and this electricity meter will measure voltage, current, power (active), and energy used by the load to monitor. The energy value is saved (in EEPROM) and can be reset using the button (on the board).

The device also offers a serial port (isolated from mains electricity using optocouplers) so to be able to read out the measured values. The serial protocol is the same as for the PZEM-004.

Compared to the PZEM-004 it comes without display and buzzer, but is much smaller. Else it uses the same design and chip.

DDM100TC

The DDM100TC (you can find it under different brands) is a 3-phase 4-wire electricity meter.

DDM100TC module, front side DDM100TC module, connectivity

The meter provides:

  • 1 LCD to show the energy used in kWh (with a precision od 0.1 kWh)
  • 3 LEDs to show which phase powered (L1, L2, L3)
  • 1 LED to show the direction to the current (reverse if REV is on)
  • 1 LED to show impulses as energy is used
  • 1 S0 interface to output impulses as energy is used

The S0 interface (labelled TEST on the side) allows me to collect the energy used on my micro-controller. Connect the + side (pin 8) to a positive voltage (i.e. +5V), an the - side (pin 7) to an input (with a pull-down resistor). Each impulse will generate a high signal (+2.5V in my case) on - for ~ 90 ms. The number of impulses indicates the energy used, and the time interval between impulses indicates the current power consumption. I chose one with a high impulse rate of 1600 impulses/kWh (= 1 impulse for every 0.625 Wh).

DDM100TC module, LCD board, front side DDM100TC module, LCD board, back side DDM100TC module, meter board, front side DDM100TC module, meter board, back side

There is also the DDM100TCR model with an RS-485 interface, but I couldn't find any documentation about the protocol messages, thus I wasn't interested in this feature.

Eastron SDM120-Modbus

The Eastron SDM120-Modbus is a slim 1-phase 2-wire electricity meter.

SDM120 front SDM120 side SDM120 board back SDM120 board side SDM120 board side

Be aware as numerous SDM120 models exist, combining following options:

  • in-line current measurement or using a current sensing coil (CT)
  • with electro-mechanical display or LCD, sometimes with backlight
  • only with 2 pulse outputs, or with additional MBus or Modbus interface

I chose the SDM120 model (one per phase) since I wanted to learn about the RS-485 interface and Modbus protocol. The corresponding Modbus document (older v2.1) lists the registers containing the measurements (input registers) and configuration (holding registers). This document also explains the Modbus protocol, but I rather recommend to read the one for the SDM630 since it contains more information, most importantly the timing between messages.

EPS8266

To send the values measured by the electricity meters and collected by the micro-controller, I used a WiFi module based on the ESP8266 SoC.

Several modules based on this chip exist. Since I only use its WiFi functionality, and no other micro-controller capability, I used the simplest, smallest, and cheapest one, the ESP-01.

ESP-01

ESP-01 moduleESP-01 pinout

To use the device, simply connect GND, VCC (3.3V), RX (module input), TX (module output), RST (using a pull-up resistor), and CH_PD (using a pull-up resistor).

AT firmware

My module showed the following firmware information when powered up (with 9600 8N1 serial configuration): Vendor:www.ai-thinker.com Version:0.9.2.4. When using the AT+GMR command to get the version it showed 0018000902-AI03. This custom firmware wasn't particularly stable, so I decided to use a more recent, and standard one.

To flash a firmware you have to enter the bootloader mode by connecting GPIO0 to ground. Then you can use one of the numerous ESP flashing tools. I used esptool.

Espressif offers SDKs for the ESP chips. Since I only want to use this module for its WiFi connectivity I only care about the AT firmware. The AT firmware allows to control the ESP using AT commands over serial. This firmware is provided in the NONOS SDKs (V2.0.0 as of 2016-08-10).

The module I had uses a 25Q40 flash chip with only 4Mbits/512KBytes. You can also identity using esptool:

esptool --port /dev/ttyUSB0 flash_id

esptool.py v1.1
Connecting...
Manufacturer: c8
Device: 4013

As mentioned in the SDK notes: “Since the release of ESP8266_NONOS_SDK_V1.5.0, AT firmware is too large to use 4Mbit flash. Please choose flash with at least 8Mbit capacity.”
This is mainly because it is now possible to update the firmware over the air, thus there needs to be a second firmware image the main firmware can write and boot.

I was still able to flash the AT firmware provided in SDK 1.5.0 from 2015-11-27 (archive) using the “non-boot” version as described in the readme.txt:

cd esp_iot_sdk_v1.5.0/bin/at/
esptool --port /dev/ttyUSB0 write_flash 0x00000 noboot/eagle.flash.bin 0x40000 noboot/eagle.irom0text.bin 0x7e000 ../blank.bin 0x3e000 ../blank.bin
esptool.py v1.1
Connecting...
Running Cesanta flasher stub...
Flash params set to 0x0000
Writing 28672 @ 0x0... 28672 (100 %)
Wrote 28672 bytes at 0x0 in 2.5 seconds (92.0 kbit/s)...
Writing 249856 @ 0x40000... 249856 (100 %)
Wrote 249856 bytes at 0x40000 in 21.7 seconds (92.3 kbit/s)...
Writing 4096 @ 0x7e000... 4096 (100 %)
Wrote 4096 bytes at 0x7e000 in 0.4 seconds (90.5 kbit/s)...
Writing 4096 @ 0x3e000... 4096 (100 %)
Wrote 4096 bytes at 0x3e000 in 0.4 seconds (90.5 kbit/s)...
Leaving...

Now when I ask for the firmware version using the AT+GMR command (with 115200 8N1 serial configuration) I get the following:

AT version:0.51.0.0(Nov 27 2015 13:37:21)
SDK version:1.5.0
compile time:Nov 27 2015 13:57:56
OK

Here is also the AT v0.51 Instruction Set for SDK v1.5 (archive).

I wasn't able to get AT firmware from later SDKs (>1.5.0) to work though. But again, this is just if you have only 4 Mbits (512KBytes) of flash. It is now also possible to get ESP-01 modules with 8 Mbits / 1 MByte of flash, which supports more recent AT firmwares.

Orange Pi

Orange Pi PC, front side Orange Pi PC, without heat sink Orange Pi PC, back side

The Orange Pi PC is a cheap $15 alternative to the Raspberry Pi 2. This single board computer (SBC) is based on an Allwinner H3 (sun8iw7p1) SoC with ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1.2GHz (often over-clocked), and 1 GB of RAM.

For this price the hardware is unbeatable, but the software support is really poor. Also only Android supports the video hardware acceleration currently. The official images are quite old (e.g. Android 4.2.2), but there are a bit newer images made available by the community:

Since I'll only use it as server I decided to go with an armbian debian jessie image.

The pin header is the same as the 40-pin Raspberry Pi, but seeing the support of the OS I wouldn't rely on the hardware drivers. I am only using this SBC a cheap computer rather than hardware platform. Also, don't forget to put a heat sink on the CPU, else they will be slowed down quite often because of the high temperatures.

On it I've installed an InfluxDB time-series database to store the values (using the HTTP API), and Grafana to visualize them.

spark_abacus.1485200067.txt.gz · Last modified: 2024/01/07 17:49 (external edit)