Low-cost energy meter with power quality functionalities

Nowadays, due to the changes in the energy scenario, the awareness of the power quality of the consumers and producers at the distribution level is increasing. In this scenario, different energy meters with enhanced functionalities have been introduced in the market. Recently, the availability of development platforms based on a single-board computer (SBC) has opened the door to the implementation of new types of low-cost meters. The SBCs can be used in different applications, thanks to the expansion boards connected to the general-purpose input-output (GPIO) interfaces. In this way, the SBC platform can be adapted to various applications, as energy meter or data logger. Specifically targeted measurement algorithms have to be implemented to exploit properly the available hardware resources and achieve suitable performance. In this paper, an improvement of functionalities of the commercial open-source energy meter SmartPi, based on the well-known platform Raspberry Pi, is proposed. The original software of the smart meter is replaced to extend its functionalities of power quality monitoring provided by the integrated circuit Analog Device ADE7878.