On to the next step in capturing samples from the direct 220V connection.

First, let me clarify why I called the first sketch “fatally flawed” – because it is, literally! The sketch required a button press to get started, a big no-no while hooked up to AC mains (isolated or not, I won’t touch it!).

The other problem I didn’t like after all, is that the sampling was taking place in burst, saving to the Memory Plug in between – which takes several milliseconds each time. That doesn’t produce a nice stream of equally-spaced ADC measurements.

So instead, I decided to redo the whole sketch and split it into two separate sketches in fact. One fills the EEPROM on the Memory plug, the other dumps it to the serial port. No more buttons or LEDs. Just a JeeNode with a Memory Plug. To make things work, a fairly peculiar series of steps has to be taken:

• upload the “saveToMem” sketch and plug in the Memory Plug
• disconnect, and hook up to the 0.1 Ω shunt etc (with power disconnected)
• insert AA battery to power the whole thing, it starts collecting
• turn on AC power
• let it run for a few seconds
• turn off AC power
• disconnect, remove the battery and Memory Plug, and reattach to USB
• upload the “saveFromMem” sketch
• open serial monitor and capture the dump to file (with copy & paste)

The key is to remove the Memory Plug as soon as it has been filled, so that the next power-up doesn’t start filling it all over again. There’s logic in the sketches to do nothing without Memory Plug.

Note that the internal ATmega EEPROM is also used to record how far the save has progressed (in units of 128 samples, i.e. 256 bytes).

It turns out that the writes to EEPROM via I2C take quite a bit of time. I settled on a 1 KHz sampling rate to avoid running into any timing issues. That’s 20 samples per 50 Hz cycle, which should be plenty to reliably identify that frequency even if its not a pure sine wave. The samples will tell.

Ok, first test run, nothing powered up. Result is mostly 511’s and a few 510’s, which is as expected – halfway the 0..1023 range:

    $ grep -n 510 unplugged.txt |wc
         115     115    1062
    $ grep -n 511 unplugged.txt |wc
       14605   14605  135044
    $ 

Next run is with the 60 W light bulb turned on a few seconds after sampling starts.

Whoops, not so good – I’m only getting 510, 511, and 512 readings, almost nothing else!

    $ grep -n 509 powered.txt |wc
           0       0       0
    $ grep -n 510 powered.txt |wc
         110     110    1012
    $ grep -n 511 powered.txt |wc
       13750   13750  126668
    $ grep -n 512 powered.txt |wc
         220     220    2026
    $ grep -n 513 powered.txt |wc
           0       0       0
    $ wc powered.txt 
       14084   14086   56366 powered.txt
    $

My conclusion so far is: can’t detect these small AC signals without additional amplification, it’s simply too weak.

It’s not really a setback, since I wasn’t planning on creating a directly-connected JeeNode setup as official solution, but it would have been nice to get a basic detection working with just a few resistors.

Maybe there’s an error in these sketches, but I’ve verified that the input senses ground as 0 and VCC as 1023, so that part at least is working as expected. I’ve placed the two sketches as a “gist” on GitHub, for reference (sampleToMem and sampleFromMem).

Back to the drawing board!