Multifunction Meter with LC Glass Display

Abstract

In industries, due to operation of heavy machinery electricity consumption is far more than that in households. As these machinery derive huge amount of electrical energy for their working so if some wastage occurs then it can cost them a lot. The reason is that Government charges not only for consumed electricity but also penal- ize for the wasted amount. Another reason to monitor the energy consumption is that if a machinery is consuming extra amount of electrical energy for its working which it usually consumes, then that can be a sign of some fault in the machinery which can lead to reduction of its life time .Thus it is important to know details of electricity consumption and too accurately. For such applications, Multifunc- tion meter has been designed.This Multifunction Meter measures consumed energy, wasted energy, Maximum and Rising Demand of any machinery and many other parameters which are required for proper estimation of consumption and wastage. Also it is necessary for a Multifunction Meter manufacturer to display the values of measured parameters. For this LC Glass has been chosen which is none other than a customized LCD.The main reason of using LC Glass is customization because if display can be customized then it becomes more user friendly which is a very im- portant aspect of a product. Multifunction Meter is basically MSP430F47177 microcontroller based embedded device whose programming is done using C language and some part of code using Assembly language. For storing the calculated values, FRAM has been used. Driv- ing an LC Glass was done using LCD controller namely PCF8578 which uses I2C protocol for interfacing. It is possible to manage and monitor 32 meters from a single place using Modbus protocol which is a serial communication protocol.