Timothy Pace & Bryan Smith: Visualization in Power and Energy in Realtime (ViPER)

New technology finding its way into the home has opened up a gateway to collect power statistics and other information in a fast and efficient way. To keep up with demand from consumers, some electric companies provide primitive visualizations of their power usage and quality of power. A problem arises from hosting all this data on a centralized network, introducing problems such as low sample rates and extremely high latency.

Under the guidance of Professor Patrick Mantey, Bryan and Tim worked with graduate student Paul Naud to develop a system that provides real time voltage monitoring using existing sensors found on APC’s UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply).  The system was developed with two goals in mind: scalability and efficiency. A Raspberry Pi was employed to store the data and host the website, and the WebSocket protocol was used by the client to facilitate the live content.