An IoT Low-Cost Voltage Sag Detector

The increase in the number of facilities embarking on the fully automated production journey, under the Industry 4.0 paradigm, is making critical the guarantee of good health of their operations. Uninterrupted operations & business continuity are key requirements for any plant, for which power quality (PQ) play an extremely important role. Voltage sags are one of the most critical PQ disturbances in the grid, so that early detection and analysis are essential for improving the continuity of supply and enhancing the productivity in any automatized facility. An Internet of Things (IoT) solution that distributed monitors and controls this critical variable would be extremely beneficial for the management of the facility and thus ensures seamless business operations. This paper describes the development of a low-cost embedded device for detecting and analyzing the voltage sags and Voltage Root Mean Square of the AC power supply. The proposed IoT sensor is built around a flexible microcontroller, which manages an energy metering IC through SPI Interface, uprising its original capabilities by including new sophisticated software functionality. Additionally, it wirelessly communicates with a cloud-based platform to allow the storage and supervision of the different events for the entire facility.