Categories
Uncategorized

Dual Volt Amp Meter

Photo of the finished Dual Channel Voltage and Current Monitor reading two USB voltages and loads
Photo of the finished Dual Channel Voltage and Current Monitor reading two USB voltages and loads

Overview

This writeup is from the GitHub pages for the VoltsAmpsLogger project and from the hackster.io project page. The code is in the VoltsAmpsLogger GitHub Code Repository

The Dual Channel Voltage and Current Monitor project was created as I needed a way to look at the voltage and current going into an Adafruit Powerboost 1000c module and through the soft switch circuit that I built from Mosaic Industries Raspberry Pi ON/OFF Power Controller. I wanted to be able to monitor the voltage and current coming out of the controller and going into the Raspberry Pi.

The project is based on the Adafruit INA219 High Side DC Current Sensor Breakout and a Raspberry Pi Pico. The Raspberry Pi Pico is a bit overkill for this project, but I have a few on hand so that is what I choose to use.

Hardware Build

Parts List

Next Steps/Going Further

The data transfer rate is extremely slow. It is good enough for what is being done here but it would be nice to capture more data points over the same period. Right now, the rate is about one set of measurements per minute. (It takes about 1.2 seconds to send one set of measurements.) One way to speed this up would be to move away from JSON and sending tab delimited data. I may create another version of the Raspberry Pi Pico and Windows software to send delimited data and see if there is an improvement. I would expect to get 4 to 5 times as many measurements in the same amount of time. It still is not very fast, but it would be an improvement.

References

External Project Pages

By richteel

Software and hardware developer who likes learning new things with a passion of sharing knowledge with others.

One reply on “Dual Volt Amp Meter”

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: