SmartPowerOutlet

Inspiration

Climate change Nowadays energy is so expensive. We need to level up our awareness on how much energy we spend and where does this consumption go. Can it be improved? Can it be reduced? Is it worth it? With SmartPowerOutlet, the domestic user has the power to identify the answers for all these questions.

What it does

The SmartPowerOutlet is a cheap and small IoT device to individually monitor power consumption for each home appliance, it can even turn them on and off! It is very easy to use, just insert each unit between your home appliance and the power outlet. The device connects to nearby WIFI and uploads the consumption data to the cloud through MQTT. The consumption data is visualized in a web-based dashboard, both in real-time and historical. Adequate graphs present the information in a useful manner, allowing the user to take proper actions.

How we built it

This project consists of the hardware that performs the measurements, the firmware that runs in it, and the software that saves the data and delivers it to the user.

Hardware

The brain of the device is an esp2866, a SoC with a microcontroller and a wifi module, as well as GPIO interfaces. With the help of a relay, a current sensor, and all the additional electronic parts to make it all work, the device is capable of switching and metering loads up to 3000 W.

Firmware

The microcontroller was programed using Arduino, using opensource Wifi and MQTT IP stack libraries widely available.

Software

Running in a RaspberryPi for development, mosquitto was used as a MQTT broker, then in node-red, the data was processed before being inserted into an influxDB database. Some Grafana dashboards have been developed to visualize the stored data.