Andrew's Week 3 Progress Report

This week I worked on the physical installation of the power metering hardware and breadboarding.  I began by soldering signal wires onto the shunt resistor.  Next after soldering the wires I attached it to the load and line side neutrals on the terminal block using crimp on fork and round terminals.  Shown below is a picture which displays the shunt resistor in the upper left corner.

After installing the shunt resistor I next mounted fuse blocks so that all the signal wires can be fused at a much lower amperage to prevent fire or overheating.  This required three fuse blocks which will provide the signal for the current and voltage measurements as well as the electronic power supply.  Shown below is a picture of the fuse blocks and the signal wires.  Currently there are 7A fuses installed but I plan to step these fuse sizes down to 1A after bread boarding is complete.

  

Finally the last task I worked on this week was breadboarding the power monitoring circuitry connected to an Atmega328P through SPI communication bus.  During this breadboarding process I needed to convert the power monitoring chip (ADE7763) from SSOP to DIP for compatible.  Classmate Wade Hansen soldered this part for me because it required high precision.  Shown below is the nearly complete breadboarded power monitoring circuit.

Next week I plan to completely finish the prototyping of the power measuring circuit and work out any communication/ micro controller hardware issues.  If I complete this task by the end of the week I will move onto working with the microcontroller ethernet circuitry.