Building a low-cost network for power-quality monitoring with open-source-hardware nodes

This paper presents the guidelines for building a low-cost network suitable for power-quality monitoring. The implementation of a standalone basic node capable of extracting various power-quality metrics (Total Harmonic Distortion-THD, Crest Factor, etc) in an open-source hardware embedded system board is described. By utilizing simple signal processing techniques directly in hardware, this node maintains high portability due to its small dimensions. Furthermore, exploitation of its built-in TCP/IP capabilities allows the deployment of a wide area network by the interconnection of basic nodes, in order to provide power-quality data collection for further processing and evaluation. Due to the distributed processing load, the proposed network can achieve high efficiency and reliability.