Design and implementation of energy data collection system using wireless fidelity (WiFi) module and current transformer

Data collection is a very important step and part in the research of energy visualization and analysis. How to make a general, reliable and convenient data collection system is a meaningful and necessary job. In this paper, we introduce a new kind of energy data collection system which is using WiFi module and current transformer. The whole hardware system can be divided into four parts. The first part is an electricity sensor unit which is the core part of the whole system. The second and the third part are combined and working together which consist of a microcontroller and a WiFi network module. The fourth part is a small data convertor. These four parts work together in the whole process. The main software design work is focus on the microcontroller. The whole software design work can be divided into three parts which are parameter setting, main working loop and Modbus functions. Here we write all the programs in C. In the outcome of the test, we can see that the data collection system can work properly and transmit the data to the remote IP address wirelessly through the Internet router. With this kind of design, the data collection system can finish the work no matter what kind of the electricity meter is.