Andrew's Week 12 Progress Report

This week I worked on putting our rough prototype into a final enclosure so that the system can be contained in one nice package.  I began this work by building the actual power supplies which were designed the week before.  I am using 120VAC-12.6VAC step down transformers into a bridge rectifier then a smoothing capacitor and finally an LM7805 linear voltage regulator which steps the 12.6VAC to 5.0V.  After building the power supplies I began mounting the hardware components into a 12X12X6 PVC enclosure so that all the aspects of the circuit can be installed in a neat manner.  After mounting and wiring each component into place I brought the project into the lab so that I could test the power supply DC voltage for each of the three different supplies.  When testing I found that I connected the smoothing capacitor for the digital power supply into the wrong ground so there was a droop in the rectified waveform.  After fixing that I noticed that the isolated side linear voltage regulator was getting hot so it was dissipating a decent amount of energy for some reason.  Despite these few issues each power supply now provides a steady 5V DC output.

After testing the power supplies I met with Ashley to test out the new enclosure.  Immediately we realized that the MOSI and SCLK pins on the micro controller side of the SPI bus were switched.  After fixing this problem we were able to program the micro controller.  Once communication between the Atmega and ADE7763 was verified we began reading in apparent and active energy with the same software as our originally working prototype.  Despite using the same software and making "identical" new connections we are getting inconsistent values.  This leads us to believe there is an issue with our hardware some place in the circuit.  We are currently in the process of ruling out causes and began by installing .1uF capacitors between each chips power supply and ground.  After that I separated the Hot voltage signal coming in from the power supplies so that the power supplies wouldnt be sending noise into our voltage channel.  Next I plan to hook the shunt into the existing amplifier circuit I used to verify the shunt earlier in the semester.  We are hoping to continue to work through the hardware and resolve this issue by the end of today or Thursday at the latest so that we can begin to work on our five artifacts.  Shown below is the enclosure as constructed.