What is it?

For those wanting to monitor lots of individual channels in a single-phase household the ADE7816 is an ideal solution. It allows differential current sensors for 3 channels and single ended current sensors for 3 more channels. The MCU interface is over SPI or I2C bus, and Arduino driver will be developed along with this breakout board.

Why did you make it?

Now to more about the energy monitor. This ASIC features 3 single-ended and 3 differential current inputs and a single-phase voltage input, all in very compact 40-pin 6x6mm QFN package. In fact the PCB is large on purpose to accomodate ease of use with stereo-jack type current clamps. The main usage would be in standard households where there are typically 3-4 lighting circuits, 1-2 socket circuits and dedicated Air Conditioning circuit. A single energy monitor could be built to monitor all channels using a single-ASIC and leave out fancy NILM stuff from worrying about the lights. The socket circuits could have anything plugged into them and can potentially have point-of-load monitoring instead of breaker board based monitoring. All this translates to more data being generated for IoT platforms and some sensible firmware work needs to be done to handle that.

What makes it special?

A single SPI port or I2C port allows measurement of 6 separate single-phase AC channels for energy in a very accurate fashion. Enough to cover most small homes with 1 boards. Software support should allow usage with most microcontrollers supporting Arduino or Micropython.

There is work in progress on supporting this board in Arduino and Micropython.