The Wattcher, USA

[Mikechastain05]

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Contact Information

University: Sonoma State University

Team Member(s): Michael Chastain & Dustin Farwell

Faculty Advisors: Dr. Farid Farahmand

Email Address: chastaim@seawolf.sonoma.edu

Country: United States

Project Information

Title: The Wattcher, USA

Description:

The purpose of this project, the Wattcher, is to design and build a Zigbee based utility monitoring and control system. LabVIEW was used as the software application, which stores the received data  in a text files, and can then be plotted on a user friendly graphical interface.

Products:

LabVIEW 2011 was used extensively in this project.

The Challenge:

The purpose of this project, the Wattcher, is to design and build a Zigbee based utility monitoring and control system. The resulting system may be used for any utility monitoring, such as water or gas, but focuses on electric power consumption at a standard American 120V wall outlet. The system’s network is a scalable star topology featuring self-powered Power Measuring (PM) nodes and a base-station. PM nodes are capable of storing sampled data, which are time stamped via a real-time clock (RTC). Each PM node also consists of external LEDs displaying the current status of the node. The base-station automatically checks and polls PM nodes for their status and whether or not they have any stored data. The software application at the base-station stores the received data from individual PM nodes in a text file, which can then be plotted on a user friendly graphical interface. The GUI allows the user to modify the data sampling rate of the PM node. The user can also specify which sensor peripherals on each PM node are actively collecting data. A key feature of the Wattcher is that the system is not limited to measuring utilities and it can easily be modified to a general purpose sensor network for various applications.

The Solution:

A website was created for our project to house all of our documentation and pictures. A quick demo video may also be viewed here: https://sites.google.com/site/ssueelwsn/home

Nominate Your Professor: (optional)

Dr. Farid Farahmand of Sonoma State University. An outstanding teacher who always pushes for you to do better. This project would not be close to what it is without his help and guidance.