The Oak by Digistump > Oak Projects

Oak Electricity Consumption Shield

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djflix:
Because since recently I'm in charge of my own energy bill I was curious about my electricity consumption throughout the day. I have an old fashioned disc-type meter and I've read some guides and pages on measuring current consumption with an Arduino. I've always found Arduino WiFi to be expensive and relatively unpractical. But now I have two Oaks!

I'm creating a shield (or should I say 'motherboard'?) for the Oak which allows me to measure my power consumption, and periodically report these measurements using the WiFi connectivity. In the future it might send me notifications if I forget to turn off a device (power consumption is above a set threshold for example), or profile the changes in consumption and correlate these to usage patterns of the fridge, for example.

Today I've designed a board, and I've put it online on github and ordered 3 pcs on oshpark. The code is also included in the repository and, of course, anyone who would like to add something to the project is very welcome :).

The board has the following features:
- Socket for an SSD1306 (I2C) OLED Screen
- 4 Buttons so I can create a user menu for 'off-line' usage and calibration/status display (buttons will probably be '-', '+', 'OK', 'Cancel', or something like that)

Any ideas or feedback? I'm all ears!

DeuxVis:
Just being curious, why are the oak connecting holes slightly misaligned on your pcb ?
It could work if you intend to put headers there and bend their legs a bit, but it's intriguing.

djflix:
It's to keep the headers in place while soldering. With regular holes the headers tend to wiggle a little bit and sometimes this results in headers not pointing exactly straight up. This is probably due to me not having the right tools to keep them in place, but I really like the way I'm able to populate all the headers, flip the board over, and then solder them all in one go without having to use a breadboard or something to keep the headers in place.

DeuxVis:
Oh right, that makes sense. Nice tip.

djflix:
Today I made some progress in creating a basic sketch. Thanks to the efforts of squix78 on his esp8266-oled-ssd1306 project I'm able to make a flying start on the display part! I also added a basic calculation for getting the current power consumption based on the interval between pulses from the power meter. Still need to verify that the calculations are okay, a few simple tests seemed to confirm this.

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