ECE497 Project Tweet-A-Watt

Team members: Chris Andrews

Grading Template
I'm using the following template to grade. Each slot is 10 points. 0 = Missing, 5=OK, 10=Wow!

 08 Executive Summary - OK 05 Installation Instructions - How do I wire up the UART? 05 User Instructions 00 Highlights - Missing 09 Theory of Operation 09 Work Breakdown 06 Future Work - Please, clean it up. 08 Conclusions 00 Demo 10 Late Comments: I think you did a fair amount of work on this, but I'd like to see it working before giving any more points.

Score: 60/100

Executive Summary
This project is based off of two projects and bringing the results to the Beaglebone Black. The first project is Tweet-a-Watt. This takes a signal from a Kill-A-Watt power meter and reports it to a host computer. The second one is RaspiWatt. This modified the first project in order to use a Raspberry Pi instead of a general purpose computer.

This should be fully working but I am having issues getting a working Beaglebone to test it.

What needs to be implemented is the cleaning up of the code to eliminate unnecessary things such as the pi plate code.

Installation Instructions
(Some pictures showing your unit and how you hooked it up would be nice.) Give step by step instructions on how to install your project.


 * Follow the hardware instruction up until the end of making the transmitter.
 * Then download the software
 * Set up a Cosm account
 * Wire the XBee to the UART pins. (How do I do this? Show pictures.)
 * Modify the Wattcher.py to use your account and the UART as the serial port

User Instructions
Plug the Kill-A-Watt in and the appliance into it. Make sure the red light is on the XBee and fire up COSM. (How do I fire up COSM? More details are needed.)

Theory of Operation
The Xbee has a A/D converter on it that transmits the current and voltage over the serial port on the Beaglebone. The python script takes the serial information and calculates the power then sends the data to COSM.

Work Breakdown
I soldered the kit together and changed the script to use the UART port on the bone.

Future Work
I need to clean up the code so that the specialized Raspiwatt code is gone.

Conclusions
I think that this project didn't really require a lot of work outside of assembly. I didn't have to modify a lot but I think that I learned a lot working with the open source code and adding a little bit to it to work with an additional platform.