Hello All!

I'm currently undertaking a project with the idea of making a sensing infrastructure, to basically monitor energy usage within a company.

The way i was thinking of doing this is having a processor (would a pic be ok for this?)

This processor will use bluetooth or infra red (i have very little experience being honest) to communicate with a chip, that will be plugged into an appliance that will then send the watts used so my thought is

walk into eg kitchen you plug a chip in and turn kettle on, this will then run up and send the information to the processor, which will save this information and total the usage of equipment this chip has been attached too.

so:
what processor could be used for each one of these tasks successfully, what do i need to look for and pref easy for a novice.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

 

You could make a kill-a-watt type device and modify it with a card reader/writer.

The card (like a key card in a hotel) could be inserted into the unit, that would power it up. The person would use the appliance. The card would be updated with the appliance ID number and the WATTAGE used. Remove card, kill power.

At the end of the day, the user could swipe the card at a central point, or a card reader connected to the network. That would download the info to the database, recording each cards appliance usage.

 

You could make a kill-a-watt type device

Note that connecting stuff to the mains is dangerous. But you can easily modify a Kill-a-watt device to get the information you're looking for. Here's a project I saw where a Kill-a-watt was modified to transmit usage information wirelessly.

http://www.ladyada.net/make/tweetawatt/