A non-invasive electricity measurement within the smart grid landscape: Arduino-based visualization platform for IoT

Measurements of consumption whether we talk about gas, water or electricity are becoming more digitized every day. Distribution companies want to be able to read the state of a meter without the need of the physical presence of the employee in the place of interest. This leads to development and implementation of smart grids using smart (embedded) devices as a part of the Internet of Things (IoT) or Industry 4.0 vision. In the first part of our paper, we discuss the evolution of smart grids and summarize the wireless technologies used nowadays for data transmissions from the sensors towards the remote nodes, where the data processing takes place. Afterwards, we propose an IoT platform for non-invasive measurement of electric current. Our design is based on current transformer measurements and works well for values of alternating current up to 30 A with extension to 100 A which significantly increases the impact for smart grid use-cases. Processing of measured data is done within the utilized Arduino board. Current readings can be displayed on attached LCD panel or sent to developed web server application which takes a part of our proposed solution. To verify the stability and accuracy of our newly designed platform, we conducted measurements for current transformer linearity and measurements on off the shelf meter from Meazon as also on AC power source from Keysight company. Maximum measured deviation of our system was 2.35 % and average calculated deviation was 1.5 %. Maximum linearity deviation of the current transformer during measurements was 1.34 %. © 2017 IEEE.