2023 Hackaday Prize: A Sensible Powermeter That You Truly Need

[Jon] wished to keep track of his home power use, however didn’t wish to need to push his knowledge as much as some cloud service that’s simply going to go away him excessive and dry sooner or later. So he went utterly DIY.

This easy and candy construct is now in its third revision, and the refinements present. A primary prototype was nothing greater than an ESP32 with a display screen and a few present transformer (CT) sensors to learn the present flowing within the wires in his breaker field. The following model added a PCB and a shade display screen, and the newest model swapped as much as eInk and a pleasant native energy provide, all sized to suit a pleasant clear energy field.

What’s actually cute about this design is using normal phono headphone jacks to plug the CT sensors into, and the general candy mixture of a neighborhood show and interactivity with [Jon]’s ESPHome-based house automation setup. This design isn’t tremendous sophisticated, however it doesn’t must be. It has one job, and it does it properly. What extra would you like?

In the event you’re involved in stepping into ESPHome and/or house automation, try this nice ESPHome useful resource. It’s most likely rather a lot simpler than you assume, and you’ll construct your system out one module at a time. In the event you’re like us, when you get began, you’ll discover it onerous to cease till every thing falls beneath your watchful eyes, if not your management.