Programmable Wireless Adapter for Commercial Electric Drives and Multifunction Meters

Continuous monitoring of power consumption data obtained from energy meters and drives installed in commercial and industrial applications is crucial for the efficient utilization of electrical energy as well as assessing the equipment's health. Though all relevant parameters are acquired in energy meters and electrical drives, they are not continuously monitored and stored for further analysis. To address this issue, we have developed a low-cost IOT-enabled programmable adapter to collect and transmit data to the cloud or on-premises server. Most commercial multifunction meters and drives are integrated with a standard Modbus RS-485 physical layer interface for data communication. The ESP32- WROOM microcontroller is used to interface with Modbus Remote Terminal Units (RTU) for the retrieval of data periodically. For validation, real-time data is collected from a chiller plant integrated with MFM384 multifunction meters and Danfoss drives. To visualize and store the data for further analysis, a flutter-based open application is developed for the users of the proposed hardware.