Trace&Follow: Modular Power Monitoring Device Based on Open Source Software

Over the past two years, the cost of electrical energy has consistently increased due to the war broke out in February 2022 between Russia and Ukraine, and the resulting complex global geopolitical situation. Consequently, companies have felt the need to raise the price of their products as a countermeasure to the escalation of production costs. They require a more precise approach to determine how these cost increases impact the manufacturing of each specific item. This not only helps them better justify price increases on their products, but also provides a transparent explanation to their customers. The device developed in this thesis named Trace&Follow, focuses on measuring power consumption. It is a modular solution that can be installed on various industrial machines, including welding machines, presses, laser cutting machines and many others. Trace&Follow consists of a baseboard and different add-on boards that expand its functionalities. Data can be sent to a cloud platform over different protocols: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, LoRaWAN, and 4G. The first two are integrated into the baseboard, while an expansion board is required for the others. Once the collected data reach the cloud platform, they are filtered, sorted, and stored into an internal database. They can be retrieved at a later time by an application and displayed to the user. Additionally, commands can be sent to the platform, which will then forward them to the device. The Trace&Follow board feature an ESP32 microcontroller from Espressif Systems. It is built upon The Xtensa® dual core 32-bit LX6 microprocessor, a highly flexible and energy-efficient microprocessor architecture developed by Cadence Design Systems. The project’s software components rely entirely on open??source code. Espressif offers its development tools, SDKs, and microcontroller core library as open source. Furthermore, Espressif microcontrollers are supported within the Arduino ecosystem, which encompasses a vast range of open-source libraries that can be utilized free-of-cost. ThingsBoard, an open-source IoT platform, is employed as the cloud platform. This platform serves for data collection, processing, visualization, and device management. When using LoRaWAN connectivity, an intermediary software is required to convert physical frames into a format that can be received by the cloud. This software, known as ChirpStack, is fully open source. Firmware running on the device strongly relies on FreeRTOS real-time operating system and it is coded using Arduino programming language, a variant of the C++ language that widely uses the concept of classes and objects to achieve better code organization.