My first take on monitoring the power grid was basically focused on clever exploitation of the capabilities the Blinkenlight Shield. As it turned out this gives a really nice experiment.

However some of my readers commented that they would have expected a means for frequency measurement. Mostly because this would allow them to modify the code for their own purposes. So here it is. The new Power Grid Monitor 2 Experiment.

Power Grid Monitoring

This new experiment really samples the grid frequency and uses the Blinkenlight Shield as some rudimentary display. Although this is much more of a real measurement I still like the old display much better 😉

One final word for this month. Some of you may already have noticed that you can not buy the shield from Rugged Circuits anymore. This is because I signed a contract with “Franzis” Germany. This basically gives them the exclusive right to manufacture and sell my shields. They also sell a special Arduino clone (designed by me) that has an integrated Blinkenlights. It also comes with a book written by me and a CD with lots of additional background material. The book contains some details and experiments that you can not find on my website. I hope this eventually makes my designs available to more people. The revenue also helps to fund my website. Still I stick to the open source idea. That is although they have exclusive commercial rights we negotiated that everything on my website will be available under the smae license terms as before.