PowerArdy Arrives!

2014-09-14 18.59.32

 

 

 

 

The PCBs arrived from DirtyPCBs.com! They came much faster than the first lot I ordered. I wasn’t expecting them in the 2 weeks they took to come, nevertheless enough of the other parts I needed had come that I could put the main bits together!

20140826_101002

 

That very night after work I busily got the parts together to solder up…

20140826_205037

Tada! Mostly completed. its still missing the 3 terminals for the doorbell, motion and light detection. They haven’t arrived yet. I made a mistake there and used the wrong spaced terminals. So many parts to choose from in EaglePCB!

 

2014-09-14 18.59.32

I fitted it into an arduino UNO and quickly got to some testing. Alas, all my results were coming in at zero, something was up! I was out of time and didnt get back to it for another 2 weeks. Seems my code was just a bit off and the library I was using from openenergymonitor.org needed some slight changes. I fixed all that up and I had results! Well 3 results out of the 5. The 9V AC jack was wired wrong but easy to fix with a small piece of wire. The Pink 3.5mm jack above was the other problem. I tested components over and over ruling them out until finally i was following a trace and found this (See red arrow below)

IMG_20140909_231356 (1)

 

A manufacturing Defect! I could not believe it! I checked the other 9 boards I got from DirtyPCBs and all of them were fine. Just the lucky one I had chosen had the flaw. Ha! This should be easy to fix with some careful scratching of the PCB. I’ve learnt to check over the PCB first before putting the boards together now. Lesson learnt. Not far away now from having very decent power monitoring!

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