19th International Symposium POWER ELECTRONICS Ee2017, October 19-21, 2017, Novi Sad, Serbia
POWER QUALITY DATA LOGGER WITH
INTERNET ACCESS
Vladimir Mitroviü, Milan Mijalkoviü
The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Applied Studies
Belgrade, Serbia
milan.mijalkovic@viser.edu.rs
Abstract— This paper describes originally designed mono-
phase power quality data logger (PQL), a successor of mono-
phase power quality analyzer (PQA) presented earlier. The
primary purpose of the analyzer was to illustrate the capabilities
of the used development board to the students of Microprocessor
software and to help the students of Power networks to visualize
disturbances generated by different electronic devices. Power
Quality Data Logger adds time as another variable and enables
students to visualize and measure power quality or distortions
over time. If PQA is compared to a still photo camera, then PQL
can be compared to a movie camera. The main idea was to extend
the functionality of the predecessor in the way that data could be
recorded or streamed in real time, allowing the user to analyze
them on-site or off-site, in real time or later. An independent
network module has been added to the device, making it capable
to stream data over the LAN or the Internet.
Keywords—Power Electronics; Quality Analizer; Data Logger;
DSP; Microcontroller; IoT; MQTT; Blynk
I. INTRODUCTION
Voltage (its amplitude and shape) and frequency are the
two basic parameters that characterize operation of a power
system and the quality of the power supplied to consumers.
These parameters should be as close to the nominal values as
possible. However, for practical and economic reasons, some
deviation must be accepted and tolerated [1].
The deviation from the desired voltage shape can be
described by harmonic distortion. Voltage spectrum can
contain harmonics (components at integer multiple of the
fundamental frequency), sub-harmonics (components at
Fig. 1. Illustration of the device placement
9781538635025/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
frequencies lower than the fundamental) or inter-harmonics
(components at non-integer multiple of the fundamental
frequency) [2], [3]. A lot of professional power quality
analyzers do not measure sub or inter-harmonics content [7].
Harmonic content in current signal is also of interest when
observing the influence of different loads on the power
network. Some electronic devices can introduce a lot of
“pollution” in power network. Harmonic current distortion
presents the quantitative measure of that influence.
Recording power quality data for a longer period (days or
months) can be useful for several reasons. One is to establish
the reason of the power network disturbance if it occurs
suddenly and unexpectedly. Another reason can be simply to
track the power consumption of the device.
II. DESCRIPTION OF THE DEVICE
This paper displays the original design of a mono-phase
power quality data logger (PQL). It is a successor of mono-
phase power quality analyzer (PQA) presented earlier [4], a
compact device based on Mikroelektronika’s Mikromedia Plus
[8] STM32 board. SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) is used for
interconnection with ESP8266 [5] utilized for Internet and Wi-
Fi communication. The main idea was to extend the
functionality of the predecessor in the way that data could be
recorded or streamed in real time allowing users to analyze
them on-site or off-site in real time or off-line. An independent
network module is added to the device, enabling it to stream
data over the LAN or the Internet without a significant impact
on the MCU performance.
The same as the predecessor, this device is placed between
the power network and the load (Figure 1) thus enabling users
to obtain an instant image of the principal characteristics of the
load, as well as information about how it affects the system
over time.
The new software version implements some additional
functionality compared to its predecessor:
• Measurement, storage, streaming and visual representation
of voltage and current of three sub-harmonics and first 128
harmonics with their three inter-harmonics. In other words,
it measures spectrum in 12.5Hz steps. Harmonics, sub-
harmonics, and inter-harmonics are presented by a ratio of
the harmonic amplitude and the amplitude of fundamental.
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 19th International Symposium POWER ELECTRONICS Ee2017, October 19-21, 2017, Novi Sad, Serbia
• Measuring frequency has been changed according to
standard [11], which means that it is measured as moving
average in the 15 second time frame.
• All measured and calculated values can be stored on the SD
card or sent over the USB or Wi-Fi as a real-time data
stream. It enables the user to monitor, record and measure
transitions.
• Implementation of MQTT protocol [6] in ESP8266
transforms PQL to an IoT (Internet of Things) solution.
• Improved calculation of all power types.
Fig. 2. Photo of the scope screen
III. USER INTERFACE
The user interface has been slightly changed. The main
screen resembles a user menu in which the user can choose:
data presentation style and medium for data storage or
streaming.
Some basic measured and calculated values are shown on
the main screen. The device presents the results after four full
periods (80ms) have been read.
The data can be presented as: Scope, Power log and VCF
log.
The scope screen (Figure 2) is similar to the main screen of
the predecessor. The waveforms of two and a half periods of
current and voltage signal are shown in the upper half of the
screen. The bottom half of the display presents the harmonic
content of both signals. Also, RMS and THD values of current
Fig. 3. Photo of the display of voltage, current and freq. over time
and voltage are shown, as well as the value of measured
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frequency. The refresh rate of the screen is 12.5 fps (frames per
second).
Power log shows all three power types over time. The user
can detect the changes in power instantly.
The VCF log (Figure 3) shows voltage, current and
frequency changes, simultaneously, over time. In this case,
power consumer is a two-speed hair dryer.
IV. HARDWARE DESIGN
The hardware (Figure 4) is almost the same as its
predecessor’s [4]. It means that the signal conditioner is the
same, based on LEM LA25-NP transducer for measuring
current, and LEM LV-25P transducer for measuring voltage
[10]. Also, MCU stage, which performs AD conversion, data
storage, processing, visualization and streaming, is the same.
The ESP8266 module has been added and connected to the
SPI port of the MCU. The ESP8266 [5] module is a self-
contained SOC with an integrated low power 32-bit CPU and
TCP/IP protocol stack that provides any MCU with access to
Wi-Fi network. The ESP8266 is capable of either hosting an
application or offloading all Wi-Fi networking functions from
another application processor. In this case, it is used for
offloading networking functions. This module has been chosen
because of its ever-growing users’ and developers’ community.
V. SOFTWARE DESIGN
The software included with the device can be divided into
three parts: firmware, data viewer, web service.
A. Firmware
The prime spot of the device is its embedded software
(firmware), which can also be roughly divided into three parts.
Those parts are: Data acquisition, Data processing and Data
presentation
The data acquisition part is used for data sampling. The
CPU samples 12-bit data from two channels at the sampling
rate of 25.6 kHz. It allows capturing of up to 128 harmonics of
current and voltage signals, their corresponding three inter-
harmonics, and three sub-harmonics.
PQL captures 2048 values of voltage and current
Fig. 4. Illustration of the device
 19th International Symposium POWER ELECTRONICS Ee2017, October 19-21, 2017, Novi Sad, Serbia
simultaneously and stores them in the temporary buffer. This
roughly presents four periods of the signal. During capturing,
the data is processed from the previously stored buffer. After
data processing, buffers are switched. The new data becomes
available for processing and the free buffer available for the
new data.
Zero crossings are used to measure frequency in a way that
frequency is measured as time elapsed between two successive
zero crossings of the same sign. The average values are
measured over the 15 second period and the last obtained data
is displayed.
All sampled and calculated data streams are saved on an SD
card. Data streams are also sent over USB and SPI interfaces.
The MCU can produce 2MHz clock as an SPI master device.
This speed is sufficient for real-time data streaming over the
high-speed network such as LAN.
The ESP8266 is on the other side of SPI line. It has its own
firmware which collects raw data from SPI and packs and
sends them as MQTT packets [6]. MQTT (Message Queue
Telemetry Transport) is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC PRF 20922)
[6] publish-subscribe-based "lightweight" messaging protocol
for use on top of the TCP/IP protocol. It is designed for
connections to remote locations where a "small code footprint"
is required, or the network bandwidth is limited. The publish-
subscribe messaging pattern requires a message broker/server.
The broker is responsible for distributing messages to
interested clients based on the topic of a message.
The ESP8266 sends data asynchronously. It waits for the
new data from the MCU and sends it over the network.
Because the duration of the sending cannot be predicted and
could take more time than data acquisition, it is possible that
ESP might fail to send some samples over the slow network.
However, sending data over the fast and widely spread
interface such as SPI, allows the MCU to be connected to more
versatile devices such as Beagle Bone, Raspberry Pi and even
Fig. 5. Illustration of the service
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PC.
B. Web service
New trends and fast development of IoT (Internet of
Things) have raised the idea of connecting PQL to the internet.
Figure 5 shows structure of the PQL Web Service. On the
left side of the figure are devices that use the service and on the
right side is the service itself.
The service consists of six microservices. Microservices are
realized as Docker containers and grouped on the virtual
server. This architecture allows easy maintenance and
scalability of the service.
Communication with PQA is implemented over SPI via
proprietary error detection protocol. ESP receives averaged
data from 125 measurements every 10 seconds, packs it and
sends it to the MQTT broker over the internet using MQTT
protocol. It is so-called publisher that publishes messages on
six topics:
• pql – general data (time, measurement number …),
• pql/voltage – RMS, amplitude, THD …,
• pql/voltage/fft – first 25 harmonics of voltage,
• pql/current – RMS, amplitude, THD …,
• pql/current/fft – first 25 harmonics of current, and
• pql/power – active, reactive, apparent, cos(f).
Service is hosted at Digital Ocean [12]. OS used for this
purpose is Linux with installed Docker [13], the world’s
leading open source software container platform. Every
element of the system is mounted on a separate container.
These elements are microservices and there are six of them:
RabbitMQ, NodeRed, Blynk, PostgreSQL [18], Metabase [19]
and NGINX [20]; all open source.
There are a few benefits of this type of architecture and
they are generalized for almost all Docker containers.
 19th International Symposium POWER ELECTRONICS Ee2017, October 19-21, 2017, Novi Sad, Serbia

First, the entire daemon, as well as all dependencies, live in
the Docker image. This means that it will function correctly on
all Linux distributions. Everything for the Docker container is
contained in one or two images. There are some security
benefits. The main is that compromising the container may
prevent additional compromise of the server. And finally,
scalability is easily achieved with Docker containers. In this
case, lack of resources can be easily compensated, only by
distributing containers over different virtual machines. The
technology called "Swarm" allows easy management of a
cluster of Docker Engines.
RabbitMQ [14] is used as the message broker. It is open
source message broker software that implements message
queue protocols such as AMQP and MQTT. The RabbitMQ
server is written in the Erlang programming language and is
built on the Open Telecom Platform framework for clustering
and failover. Client libraries interfacing with the broker are
available for all major programming languages.
The broker's primary task is to manage messages between
publishers and subscribers. PQL publishes messages to the
broker. The broker has at least one subscriber, which is another
microservice, made using NodeRed. Also, because MQTT
protocol is exposed outside the service, there can be other
subscribers. An example is an Android application called
“MQTT Dash” which is one of the applications used for data
monitoring (Figure 7).
Node-RED [15] is a programming tool for wiring together
hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and exciting
ways. It provides a browser-based editor that makes it easy to
wire together flows using the wide range of nodes in the palette
that can be deployed in a single-click.
PQL uses Node-RED as a bridge between RabbitMQ and
Blynk server. It also presents real-time data over the web in the
form of a dashboard. Received message, from MQTT node,
travels, as payload, to JSON parser. From the JSON parser, it
goes as an object to the function node, which sends it further to
gauge, text, graph and Blynk nodes. Gauge, text and graph
nodes are used to present real-time data at the dashboard
(Figure 6), and Blynk node is used for connection with Blynk
server over a web socket.
Blynk [16] is a Platform with iOS and Android applications
to control IoT devices. Also, it is a digital dashboard for
building a graphic user interface for any IoT project by just
dragging and dropping widgets. It is successfully funded on the
Kickstarter [17]. It is not tied to some specific hardware. Blynk
platform consists of Blynk server and Blynk mobile
application.
Even though Blynk server can be used as a message broker,
Fig. 7. , Blynk Dashboard (right) and MQTT Dashboard (left)
RabbitMQ is used instead. This decision has led to a significant
improvement of performance. The beautiful design of the
mobile application and some useful features made Blynk a part
of the service (Figure 7). It has been used for serving data to
the mobile application, storing data to the PostgreSQL database
and as a web API.
API outsources measured data and enables a user to
develop other, remote, off-site applications which will handle
that data measured in real-time differently.
VI. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
Experimental results presented here are from a remote
location over the three-day period. It is well-known that the
chosen location has some issues with power quality. PQL has
been set to send averaged data from 125 measurements every
10 seconds. Voltage frequency, amplitude and harmonics of
one phase are measured. The given data is compared with the
standard (SRPS EN 50160:2012) [11] for voltage
characteristics of electricity supplied by the public distribution
network and with the measurements from another location.
The remote location is placed in the unpopulated rural area.
There is no nearby industry. Measurement point is about 2.5km
away from the power transformer station. The other location is
placed in the metropolitan area. Measurements from this
location are used for the purpose of comparison.

Fig. 6. Example of PQL’s dashbord (a part of the screen)

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 19th International Symposium POWER ELECTRONICS Ee2017, October 19-21, 2017, Novi Sad, Serbia

Fig. 7. Measured voltage over time (upper – remote location, bottom – local measurement)

both graphs, we can infer that harmonics with significant

A. Voltage measurement values are second, third, fifth and seventh, which is expected
Figure 7 shows the measurement results. The upper graph behavior.
presents values measured at the remote location and the bottom
graph shows values measured locally. The dashed line is the The largest THD value measured at the remote location was
195V threshold (minimal value according to standard [11]). 4.63% which is slightly higher than locally measured 3.07%
The bottom figure shows almost straight line at about 230V but, both values are within the range. Average THD values are
and the upper line varies a lot. Voltage drops on the top graph 2.57% for remote and 2.79% for local.
are far below the minimum voltage and last much more than C. Frequency measurement
the standard allows.
There was no deviation in frequency. Figure 9 shows that
The number of values, measured at the remote location, that measured frequencies are from 49.9Hz to the 50.1Hz. The blue
are below the threshold of 195V are almost the quarter of all bars represent frequency from the remote location and green
measured values. bars, from the local measurements.
B. Voltage harmonics analyisis
Figure 8 shows values of first 25 harmonics. The left graph
presents data from the remote location and the right presents
locally measured data. The blue bars are maximum values over
the measured period, the green present averaged data and the
purple ones are according to the standard [11].
As it is shown, in both cases, all harmonics are within the
range. In the left graph, the maximum of the third harmonic is
very high, but because average value is small we can conclude
that it is a peak value. It is the same with 15th harmonic. From

Fig. 9. Frequency distribution

D. Power measurement
Current and power consumption over time, total harmonic
distortion and harmonic analysis of current and all three types
of power were monitored.
Figure 10 shows all three types of power (active (blue),
reactive (purple) and apparent (green)) averaged over a minute
in the 24-hour period. The consumer in the example is a
refrigerator with 300W compressor.
Fig. 8. Harmonics values of voltage

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 19th International Symposium POWER ELECTRONICS Ee2017, October 19-21, 2017, Novi Sad, Serbia

allows better security, easy maintenance and scalability of the

service.
REFERENCES
[1] Roger C. Dugan, Mark F. McGranaghan, Surya San-toso, H. Wayne
Beaty, „Electrical power systems quality”, Second Edition, the
McGraw-Hill, 2004.
[2] Miloje M. Kostiü, ”Poveüanje energetske efikasnosti elektromotora u
pogonima”, Elektrotehniþki institut Nikola Tesla, Beograd, 2010.
[3] Ž. Janda, „Pregled standarda i preporuka za kontrolu viših harmonika u
elektriþnim mrežama“, Elektro-tehniþki institut Nikola Tesla, Beograd,
2004.
[4] V. Mitroviü, M. Mijalkoviü, “Monophase power quality analyzer”,
EE2015, Novi Sad, 2015.
Fig. 10. Types of power over time [5] ESP8266EX Datasheet,
https://espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/0a-
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[7] Chauvin Arnoux C.A 8335, http://www.chauvin-
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http://www.mikroe.com/mikromedia/plus/stm32/, Jun 2017.
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http://www.st.com/web/en/resource/technical/document/datasheet/DM0
and firmware have been designed as a tool which will enable a 0037051.pdf, Jun 2017.
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power measurements, including the power quality LEM Corporation Geneva, 2012.
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examples of different implementation of the device for various http://www.iss.rs/rs/standard/?national_standard_id=36092, Jun 2017.
purposes. It has become a more versatile device than its [12] Digital Ocean, https://www.digitalocean.com/, Jun 2017.
predecessor. The Internet of Things movement is opening up [13] Docker, https://www.docker.com/, Jun 2017.
entirely new economic possibilities for remote monitoring of [14] RabbitMQ, https://www.rabbitmq.com/, Jun 2017.
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With organization of service like this, the goal to view,
[18] PostgreSQL, https://www.postgresql.org/, Jun 2017.
store and review measured data online is fully achieved.
[19] Metabase, http://www.metabase.com/, Jun 2017.
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