Voidbox Industries’ Chloe Madison has launched a crowdfunding marketing campaign for the PwrTool 500, a 60V 500A energy and battery monitor designed to simply built-in into House Assistant.
“PwrTool 500 is an open supply battery and energy monitor designed for off-grid power programs,” Madison explains of the undertaking. “It integrates seamlessly with House Assistant and helps direct customization by way of ESPHome or your personal firmware. Designed for many 12–48 VDC programs, PwrTool 500 is constructed to deal with as much as 500A peak present throughout 6–60 VDC, and gives detailed perception into your power movement, era, storage, and utilization so you’ll be able to monitor and automate data-informed actions.”
Madison first unveiled the PwrTool 500 round a yr in the past, revealing a design constructed across the Texas Devices INA238 16-bit energy monitor chip with a Voidbox FLIP_C3 Espressif ESP32-C3 microcontroller board and ambient temperature and humidity monitoring alongside the promised energy monitoring capabilities. There’s an 45W N-channel MOSFET for lighting or load management, and Qwiic/STEMMA QT appropriate enlargement for exterior sensors — or to daisy-chain a number of PwrTool 500s collectively.
“Typical ‘sensible shunts’ lock your information into proprietary apps and ecosystems,” Madison says of the rationale for designing one thing new. “Even when modified, they usually require decoding undocumented protocols. PwrTool 500 is completely different due to its absolutely open {hardware} and software program. With direct entry to the sensors, firmware, and GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output], you’ll be able to configure PwrTool 500 to satisfy your system’s actual necessities with no vendor lock-in.”
The PwrTool 500 is designed to connect with Wi-Fi then mechanically register itself in House Assistant due to a pre-flashed ESPHome firmware, and there is a header for switching between hot- and cold-side set up. As beforehand promised, it is also open supply beneath the Inventive Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 license with an EasyEDA Professional undertaking file containing a schematic, board structure, and invoice of supplies accessible on the undertaking wiki — with a separate undertaking file accessible for the FLIP_C3 microcontroller board at its coronary heart.
These fascinated with selecting up a ready-to-use unit moderately than constructing their very own, in the meantime, can accomplish that on the undertaking’s Crowd Provide marketing campaign web page, the place {hardware} is out there for $149 with free worldwide transport; all units are anticipated to ship in late April subsequent yr.
