Picture the scene... You're away on holiday, sunning yourself in Spain (or if you're Spanish, enjoying the damp weather in the UK !) ... and thousands of miles away, some spurious minor electrical niggle in your house causes the RCD circuit breaker to open. You return 10 days later to find the contents of your freezer oozing their way across the kitchen floor. Not nice... You reset the breaker, and the power comes back on, showing no faults.
It happens from time to time in my house. I've tested each circuit, and every appliance to try and find the cause of the random tripping. The fault is not visible on any of my insulation readings, but, nevertheless it does happen. Sometimes not for years.... frustrating!
So what can we do about it? Fix the fault would be the easiest thing to do, but it's eluding me. How about monitoring the mains, and sending me a message, so if it does trip, I can reset the power without issue? Good plan...
Now the disclaimer:
WARNING. Do NOT try this at home. This project deals with mains voltages. A shock from the mains will hurt and can easily be fatal. Work safely. Use an RCD. Disconnect from the mains before making any adjustments.
RESPECT IT'S AUTHORITY.
I will not, under any circumstances, accept any liability if you decide to re-create this project for yourself.
Now that's got that out of the way...
So, we have a plan. Measure the mains voltage (and why not frequency at the same time?), and act conditionally on it's failure. We also need to get it to send us a message. We're going to need some form of uninterruptable power supply, so when the mains does go off, our micro will still be running, and we've got power enough to send the message. Here's the circuit:
I'll go through it step by step...
Power comes in via a fuse to two transformers. TR1, is a mains to 15V transformer, and is used as our power supply. It feeds a bridge rectifier, B1 and C1 and C2 are used to smooth and decouple the resultant DC. The DC is fed via D2 to a 7805 regulator, which provides the 5V for the Arduino and the SIM900 module. So that's fairly straightforward. The 7805 in this instance is a 2A part, as the SIM900A does require a fair amount of current to function.
(You could, and it would be safer to do so, build this unit using two wall warts, one, with, say at 15VDC, 3A output to replace TR1 & B1, and a second, with AC output in place of TR2. That way, all the tricky and potentially dangerous stuff with the mains is eliminated)
The rectified DC from B1 is also fed to two LM317 voltage regulators in series. The first, IC1, is configured as a 100mA constant current source, this is then used to feed the second regulator, IC2, which is configured as a conventional voltage regulator, in this case, R3 is adjusted to provide around 14V. This forms a 100mA constant current charger, with maximum voltage of 14V, which we can use to charge G1, which is an old 12V NiMH battery I happened to have kicking about. It's got plenty of capacity left, so will do nicely as our back up battery. S3 is a battery diconnect switch. Useful for resetting. (Why didn't I use an LM200, as it is capable of both current and voltage regulation in one package, instead of two LM317's? Because I didn't have one!)
So, when the mains is present, our battery is being charged. In the event of mains failure, D2 will stop conducting, and the supply will be seamlessly taken over by the battery, supplying current to the 7805 via D1. D3 prevents current flowing back into the charging circuit. The battery voltage is also sampled at the mid-point of the potential divider, R11 and R12, and fed to the Arduino A1 pin. T2, between the reference pin of IC2 and ground, is used to switch off the charging circuit momentarily, so we can measure the battery voltage, and not just the output of the charger. It's controlled by the Arduino A2 pin, configured as a digital output.
OK, so that's power and back up power sorted, so what about measuring the mains? TR2 is a small (3VA) 18V mains transformer. This feeds another bridge rectifier, B2, and a small smoothing network, formed by C7. The voltage developed across C7 is fed to a potential divider formed by R5 and R4, and the resultant voltage fed to Arduino A0. This voltage will be directly proportional to the mains input voltage on the primary of T2.... or will it? Whilst I was experimenting, I noticed the measurement wasn't linear. Adding a bit of loading, in the form of R15 to the secondary helped matters no end, although it was accurate enough over the range required for this to be left out, if required.
Also coupled to the secondary is our frequency measuring network. The AC is fed via coupling capacitor C8 to the base of a BC547, T1. This provides a 5 volt 50 Hz signal to the input of IC4A (a Schmitt trigger hex interter), this will square our pulses up. The output of IC4a is fed via a low pass filter, formed by R8 and C9 to the input of IC4B, the output of which is connected to the Arduino pin D8. We'll use this to measure the frequency of the mains. Tie all of the unused inputs of IC4 to ground.
On to the micro side of things...
The LCD is wired to the Arduino in the time-honoured fashion, except for the cathode of the backlight, which isn't connected straight to ground, but to the collector of T3. This allows us to control the backlight, using A4 of the Arduino configured as a digital output. There's a momentary switch coupled to A3, which is used as a "push to transmit" function, and a toggle switch, S2, connected to pin A5, which is used to stop the SIM900 sending messages. R9 is the LCD's contrast control.
The SIMR pin on the SIM900 module is connected to the Arduino's hardware serial Tx pin, and the SIMT pin is connected to the Rx pin.
The software.....
We're going to need something to measure our frequency. I did initially use PulseIn , but it's not that accurate, so I switched to using the most excellent FreqMeasure library, available from
https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_FreqMeasure.html . Now this has a drawback. It uses Int 1, and this is in conflict with the software serial library, which is why the SIM900 is connected to the hardware serial port of the Arduino. The issue here is the hardware port is also where the inbuilt USB interface sends/receives data, so you'll need to disconnect the SIM900 from the arduino whilst uploading the sketch, or doing any serial debugging. You can use SoftwareSerial during development, but be prepared for some unusual responses from FreqMeasure!
Ok, so the sketch.
There's a rake of variables set at the start. The variables to watch are the mains tolerances, these will need to be set for your local mains (They're currently set for UK mains spec.)
float MainsMinV = 216.2; // This sets the lower limit for the mains voltage. Change this to suit your local voltage limit
float MainsMaxV= 253; // Maximum voltage limit
float BatteryMin=11.2; // Battery low limit
float MainsMinF=49.5; // Minimum allowable mains frequency limit, change to suit local power
float MainsMaxF=50.5; // Maximum allowable mains frequency limit.
You will also need to change line 260 :
Serial.println("AT + CMGS = \"+44xxxxxxxxxx\"");// recipient's mobile number, in international format
If your mains is not ~240v, you will also need to change the scaling factor in the software , line 286, so the voltage reads correctly.
Currently the mains voltage is scaled so 250V is equal to 5V at our micro. If, say, you're on 120V mains, and want the voltage to top out at , say 130V, then the scaling will be 130/5 = 26.
It's currently set to 51, so 5V on our analogue port reads as 255V :
ACVoltage = (sensorValue * (5.0 / 1023.0))*51;
Adjust R4 to get the mains calibration correct.
So, here's the complete sketch:
If you're using a SIM900A module outside of Asia, you may run into difficulties, as I did. There's some brief notes I made here :
http://andydoz.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/sim900-and-sim900a-module-signal.html and a link to a website which contains detailed instructions on sorting out the firmware to make the unit work.
Here's some pictures of my unit:
BTW. Sainsbury's is my service provider!
Electrical Safety is paramount. Here is the incoming mains earth (ground) securely tied to the chassis of my metal case.
Now, we could build ourselves a small boost circuit to do this for us, but thankfully, we can purchase a module from eBay for very little money.
....enter the ACS712 current motoring IC.
There are two relay modules, which are used to switch the charger on, and the other to enter "bypass mode", whereby if the battery to be charged requires more than 5A at the minimum voltage, the booster will be bypassed, until the charge current falls below 5A, at which point the booster can safely take over.
A small PCB is etched ... 
Here's a great website for creating a 3D view. It only works with small boards (unless you want to pay for it) ... but's its a fun thing... just drag and drop your .brd file from eagle into it! You can zoom around and look at any angle, even from below ... Website can be found at 3dbrdviewer.com. (Sadly, since writing this, the site has closed.)
