DC Power Monitor

Overview

The DC Power Monitor Reference Design is a modification to the AC Power Monitor design that can target an entirely different industry. Instead of indirectly measuring current using a coil around an AC wire, we directly run the DC current through a shunt resistor and an ADC measures the voltage that develops across the resistor.

The power monitor measures total on time and is capable of tracking a wide range of consumer and industrial power sources.

Blog post

Read more about this project and use case on the DC Power Monitor blog post.

Business Use Case

The electrification of everything is coming; as the work changes to renewable energy, we will see more and more devices needing DC power charging. We can use simple monitoring devices to track current, voltage, and power (calculated).

Some examples of how you might use this out in the world:

• Battery charging infrastructure
• Energy usage of DC based devices
• Efficiency monitoring
• Small machine utilization (similar to our AC power monitor)

Official Repository

View the source code on the official repository:

• Golioth DC Power Monitor reference design

This reference design is based on the Golioth Reference Design Template.

Schedule a demo!

If you would like a demo of this reference design, please contact [email protected].

Block Diagram

Device Photos

Parts List

• Electronics
  • Nordic nRF9160 LTE-M/NB-IoT SiP on a Sparkfun Thing Plus nRF9160 board
  • (2) INA260AIPWR Current measure chips on a MikroE VCP Click
  • Golioth Aludel-Mini circuit board
  • LiPoly Battery
  • Ostentus i2c based display
• Mechanical / Enclosure
  • Aludel Mini Case based on the CU-1937-MB ABS Enclosure from Bud Industriries (~3.1"x3.1") with custom cutouts
  • (3) 5.5 x 2.1 mm DC Power Jack
• Data
  • Hologram SIM card

Dashboard

The Grafana dashboard connects to the Golioth REST API to access data from the DC Power Monitor. Time-series electrical current readings on two ADC channels are graphed to visualize duration and frequency of use as well as current draw. The live runtime of each channel is shown to indicate if the machine is currently in use and for how long. A maximum current reading for each device is available, as is the lifetime runtime of the machines.