Tag Archives: power

CuVoodoo #023 – forever olaf



building a power outage alert notification:
We will build a device to notify us in case of a power outage in our home. For that we just need to re-purpose a GSM tracker.

documentation watch on other devices (youtube)

Post-scriptum: do not waste any time on the Orange Pi 2G IoT.
While the idea and the hardware sound nice, after working a bit with it, there are just too many issues:

  • the official Linux distributions are old (> 1 year), the kernel is even older (it still is a 3.10)
  • the serial port is unstable (freeze on overrun)
  • the wifi is very unstable
  • the wifi MAC changes at every boot
  • the battery managment actually does not work at at all (no power and no charging due to a mistake in the design)
  • it is not supported by armbian

Published: 2018-05-27 by King Kévin

CuVoodoo #019 – time to spark!



real power vs. apparent power:
We all know voltage times current is power, real power, but don't forget the time component since the RMS values will only give you apparent power, and this is by a power factor different.

watch on other devices (youtube)


Published: 2016-12-24 by King Kévin

CuVoodoo #014 – the spark counter



my custom wireless electricity meter:
While renewing my distribution board the land lord decided to remove the electricity meter. Now I can't note how much electricity I am using. So I decided to build and install my own electricity meter: the spark counter. Using a cheap power meter (i.e. peacefair PZEM-004), a microcontroller (i.e. Arduino Nano 3.0), radio transceivers (i.e. nordic nRF24L01+), a single board computer (i.e. Raspberry Pi), and some storage and visualization tools (i.e. influxDB and grafana) I am now able to measure, log, and monitor my electricity consumption.

documentation source files watch on other devices (youtube)

I also briefly describe how to use a Saleae Logic clone logic analyzer with PulseView and sigrok.

warning: the electricity meter I am presenting will only work for 1 phase 2 wires power distribution systems. I have a 3 phases 4 wires system and I am doing it wrong.


Published: 2015-10-29 by King Kévin