Final year project completed over the course of November 2022 - April 2023
Report: Smart-Wireless-Sensor-Final-Report.pdf
Website: https://smart-wireless-sensor.nw.r.appspot.com/
This project aims to research, design, and develop an embedded smart wireless sensor solution that can augment individual three-phase system Digital Fault Recorders (DFRs) to solve their main two problems – the DFR recordings and other useful near-real-time measurements/metrics cannot be accessed/retrieved remotely and secondly, it may be electrically impossible to install DFRs in certain substation scenarios due to their hardwiring requirements and size constraints.
The ESP32-DevKitC-32UE MCU was concluded as the optimal prototyping platform for the project. A range of other components were acquired, including two ADS1015 ADCs for taking voltage readings, a MicroSD card breakout for storing the useful live measurements, a GPS breakout for interrupt timer disciplining and a secondary ESP32 for handling external communications. Two signal conditioning circuits were then designed and engineered to attenuate the secondary-side voltage (VT) and current (CT) signals down to 1VRMS, which were then fed into the two ADCs.
The 1200sps readings taken by the ADCs are then run through various validated algorithms to calculate the 12 final useful live measurements. These 12 near-real-time measurements are then displayed on the secondary ESP32 Wi-Fi Access Point & Station Web Servers, along with being sent through a backend pipeline to a cloud-hosted React JS website and stored in cloud data storage. The true frequency and VRMS algorithms were validated through a simulation in MATLAB and found to be over 33 times more accurate than originally required (+-0.3mHz and +-0.3mV, respectively).
