A REMOTE MONITORING AND CONTROL SYSTEM FOR ENERGY MANAGEMENT USING INTERNET OF THINGS by Manpreet Singh
Abstract
Electrical network must be monitored in order to acquire the measurands viz; voltage (V), current (A), power factor (ɵ), power (VA) and energy consumption (kWh). In the present energy scenario it is
pertinent to improve the system efficiency in order to minimize power wastage. Remote monitoring and control system based on IoT has been successfully implemented to achieve the above mentioned objective. The system comprises of Remote Terminal Units (RTU) which are connected to the main server that communicate with it over Ethernet cables using TCP/IP protocol. Atmega328p microcontroller acts as the brain of Remote Terminal Units which are programmed using the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Voltage, current, humidity and temperature sensors are interfaced with microcontroller. Electrical loads are connected to the microcontroller via electromechanical relays. ENC 28j60 is used to connect the atmega328 microcontroller with internet that enables the microcontroller to send data over internet. Hardware is designed using the open source software Dip Trace and it is finally fabricated. A desktop computer with Linux operating system acts as a server that acquires and stores the data in the form of *.csv file. This data is visualized in the form of graphs and it can be subjected to statistical analysis. Server software is developed using the Object Oriented approach of Python language. It consists of several parts viz; Graphic User Interface (GUI), networking system, speech synthesis and data storage system. All these parts run in parallel using multi-threading approach. Graphic User Interface of software is created using the Tkinter library. Python sockets are used to handle the networking and to communicate with the remote terminal units. The data between server and clients is transferred using the Transfer Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP). Speech is synthesized using the festival framework. Threading module of language manages all the tasks in parallel and they are well synchronized with each other. Data is stored with time stamp which is obtained from the time module. The whole prototype has been set up in the microcontroller and PLC lab in Department of Electrical Engineering and has been successfully tested.
