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EnerJar: A Digital Energy Meter

This project won the grand prize of 2008 Green Gadgets Design competition. It measures the power consumption of an electrical gadget with high accuracy. The project uses PIC16F877A microcontroller to compute the power and shows the output on a 4-digit multiplexed seven segment display.


The power consumed by an electrical appliance is simply the product of voltage across the appliance and the current drawn by it. Voltage measurement is pretty straight forward. Using a resistor divider network, 120 V can be converted down to below 5 V, and can be read through ADC port. However, PIC cannot measure the current directly, it must be converted to voltage first. This is done by a low shunt resistance. This voltage drop across the shunt resistance is too small and requires a precision instrumentation amplifier to boost it to appropriate level.



The firmware for PIC is available to download.



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Comments

  1. prakashjjJanuary 31, 2012 at 6:17 AM

    sir, can you send me the coding and other details to my mail..i am doing the same project...pls kindly help me.. my mail id is prakashgkm@gmail.com.. thanks

    ReplyDelete
  2. britantyoJuly 2, 2013 at 12:39 AM

    i want the code too... tyo_red_hot@yahoo.co.uk

    FYI: the enerjar.net is error

    ReplyDelete

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