Abstract
Measuring home energy use data is significant for reducing energy consumption and impact on the environment. Given the development of information and communication technology, data are easily collected over ubiquitous integrated networks. Near field communication such as Bluetooth and ZigBee is widely used to monitor home energy consumption along with its applications of home energy management systems (HEMS). This paper describes a prototyping of an energy consumption monitoring module using the near field communication. The monitoring module measures voltage and current of arbitrary electric power sources such as solar arrays and wind turbines as well as home appliances, and is designed with water proof casing structure. It comprised of three layers: low-level and middle-level layers include 8 sets of voltage dividers and current sensors, and high-level layer includes a battery, an A/D converter, which has 16 A/D channels, and a Bluetooth board for wireless serial data transmission. We have validated its data conversion using a reduced-size house model and data transmission via Bluetooth connection.
