Smart Building Metering Made Easy: BeagleBone® Green-based Solution for Real-time Monitoring and Optimization
Project Introduction
The BeagleBone® Green-based customization solution collects real-time data for residential and factory water, electricity, and gas usage. It transmits data to the cloud and local database for real-time and remote monitoring. It helps the administrator to optimize electricity/water/gas purchasing and distribution.
key Info
Seeed Solution: Customized BeagleBone® Green
Industry: Smart Building/ Building Metering
Pilot Project: United States
Background
As for tracking factory and residential needs such as water, electricity, and gas, Seeed Studio‘s customized BeagleBone® Green is used as a smart gateway to collect real-time data and transmits data to the cloud for real-time and remote monitoring.
Solution
Through RS485 communication, the gateway and smart meters establish data communication, enabling real-time collection of electricity consumption data, including energy consumption, power, voltage, current, and other information from the electric meters. (A single gateway can communicate with multiple meters simultaneously.)
The gateway is responsible for transmitting the collected data to a cloud database via WiFi. Users can access their data for free from the cloud using their unique access key from a known fixed location. Additionally, the gateway may also allow for data storage at the edge (locally) to serve as a backup in case of internet or network failures. Once the internet connection is reestablished, the data will be uploaded to the cloud.
It’s important to note that the gateway not only receives control commands from the cloud or superior systems but also provides feedback on the status and real-time data of the meters back to the cloud or superior systems. This enables bidirectional communication and control, making remote monitoring and management more flexible and efficient. For example, it is possible to dynamically adjust the current transformer (CT) ratio, reset the maximum demand value, or program time-of-use (TOU) tariff rates. This flexibility allows for configuration and optimization based on specific requirements.
The following customization is made to our BeagleBone® Green to better cater to their solution:
- Increased DC input to 9V – 24V
- added the real-time clock
- and added RS485 interface.
Results
The functionality of bidirectional control has been upgraded, allowing for unprecedented capabilities and exceptional ease of use.
This BeagleBone®-based solution helps in monitoring the system in real time, data tracing, overload warning in a long life cycle. It has been successfully deployed in large-scale installations, with thousands of customers benefiting from its features.
Background of BeagleBone® Green Series
Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green Series is a series of powerful SBCs jointly developed by Seeed Studio and BeagleBoard.org. They are fully compatible with the original BeagleBone® Board and have been integrated with Grove connectors, enabling users to quickly start a prototype project on this powerful platform with a bulk of Grove accessories.
BeagleBone® Green
Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green is a joint effort between BeagleBoard.org and Seeed Studio, and it is based on the open-source hardware design of BeagleBone® Black.
It is a low-cost option that provides the compact footprint, numerous interfaces, and expandability of BeagleBone® Black while extending the development environment with on-board Grove connectors that work with the Seeed Grove ecosystem. Furthermore, Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green is fully compatible with BeagleBone® Black capes.
Moreover, it comes with a Debian image installed on the on-board 4GB 8-bit eMMC flash storage, where you can connect the board to a 5V power supply or the USB port of your PC to easily power it up.
BeagleBone® Green Wireless
Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green Wireless Development Board is based on TI AM335x, and is the first Wi-Fi + Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) board from the Beagle community. It offers a Wi-Fi and BLE solution with a built-in 2.4 GHz TI WLinkTM8 module with two antennas.
It also supports AP+STA mode of communication, comes with an MRAA library, and complies with Bluetooth Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP). The board also comes with two Grove connectors, making it easier to connect to the large family of Grove sensors.
BeagleBone® Green Gateway
Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green Gateway Development Board is a commercial-grade single-board computer (SBC). It is based on the open-source hardware design of Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green and Seeed Studio BeagleBone® Green Wireless and combined with the onboard Wi-Fi + Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) + Ethernet features. Which also supports various BeagleBone® Cape that can perform different functions.
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