5th International Electrical Engineering Congress, Pattaya, Thailand, 8-10 March 2017
Implementation of WiFi-Based Single Phase Smart
Meter for Internet of Things (IoT)
Win Hlaing
The Sirindhorn International Thai-German Graduate School
of Engineering (TGGS)
King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok,
Bangkok, Thailand
winluckornaim@gmail.com
Abstract— With the advent of Internet and computational
era, not only opportunity to send and receive data between
humans, but also among the devices without human control over
it. This is known as Internet of Things (IoTs) concept which can
be applied for solving the growing issue of power/energy
management. A solution is a cheap and easy to implement and
manage energy monitoring system for our daily usage of electric
power. In order to overcome the human errors, manual labor
and cost reducing in energy consumption with more efficiency for
the power management system, in this paper, we focus mainly on
IoT's energy monitoring. The proposed design is to implement a
very low cost wireless sensor network and protocol for smart
energy and web application capable of automatically reading the
unit and sending the data automatically for the power users to
view their current energy meter reading. By using this system,
the users will be aware of the electricity usage in his/her home to
reduce the power wastage and cost of consumption. The system
consists of a digital energy meter, ESP8266 WiFi module and web
applications for management system. The ESP8266 WiFi module
will be embedded into the meter and implement the TCP/IP
protocol for the communications between the meter and web
application. The experimental results show that the proposed
system works very well with efficiency, and it is feasible to
implement in practical applications for very low cost-build
automatic energy meter reading.
Keywords— Smart Meter;Power Monitoring; internet of things;
WIFI ESP8266; Arduino; Smart Home; wireless sensor network;
Web Portal.
I. INTRODUCTION
The new era of Internet of Things (IoT) which was refer to
uniquely identifiable objects and represent in an “internet-
like” structure has played major role of our daily life in terms
of intelligence and automation as convenience ways. By
creating connectivity, IoT, as intelligent system, connect
things like universal global neutral network, as a result of this
process, there are huge volume of data are being generated
which need to management and control. As the technology is
advancing, the IoT’s automation management system is
applied in many basic infrastructures such as electricity, gas,
and water management systems in order to make it more
convenient for individual and organizations [1]. Therefore, the
978-1-5090-4666-9/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Somchai Thepphaeng, Varunyou Nontaboot,
Natthanan Tangsunantham, Tanayoot Sangsuwan,
Chaiyod Pira
The Sirindhorn International Thai-German Graduate School
of Engineering (TGGS)
system can overcome the issues of human error and power
loss in terms of controlling and management. In addition, it
can also solve the manual control and a unit recording
operation without human error. To achieve this sophisticated
system, the communication and networking are the major role
to track all kind of connectivity among the individual devices.
The challenge is to build the network system with robust, at
the same time low power consumption as well as inexpensive.
The main objective of our proposed system is to implement
and develop very low cost WiFi-based single phase digital
energy meter with IoTs concepts. By using low cost ESP8266
Wi-Fi module, the system can provide data communication
between digital energy meters and web server gateway, so that
it can monitor for the energy management system. By using
this system, the billing of the power users can be based on
actual consumption rather than estimate based from the
previous consumption. This paper is organized as follows. In
section 2, literature survey and related works will be
described. In section 3, the explanation of the whole system
architecture will be showed. In section 4, the system
implementation of the proposed system examined. The last
two parts are the experimental results and conclusion.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY AND RELATED WORKS
In recent years, a large amount of papers had proposed the
design and implementation of the IoT gateway for smart home
with wire, wireless and integrated both wire and wireless.
With wired home automation system, some researchers
proposed system with a remote system for controlling water
temperature through transmission control protocol and Internet
protocol (TCP/IP) protocol with lower hardware-cost [2].
However, in order to use this system, the user needs to install
special software which poses inconvenience and the system
includes with multiple sensors at the same time is
complicated. Apparently, the wired base system encounters
some difficulties, such as the deployment of communication
lines between devices and the installation of back-end
systems. It can increase the build-cost and maintenance cost,
so as to reduce the interest of users to afford a home
automation system [3]. In order to reduce the build cost, with
wireless system, some researchers designed a home gateway
for ZigBee and Ethernet networks for environmental friendly
green system for air pollutant monitoring and homecare
5th International Electrical Engineering Congress, Pattaya, Thailand, 8-10 March 2017
applications [4]. However, the designed ZigBee/Ethernet
gateway did not support the functionalities of traditional
access point. The gateway can only exchange sensing data and
commands between two devices via Internet or Intranet. In
addition of integration of personal wireless local area network
and internet home automation system [5], there is a study with
various communication systems including internet, GSM,
wireless radio frequency, however the existing system
architecture required very high equipment cost and very low
interest of users [6]. Compared with the existing system, our
propose system is not only capable of reducing the
implementation and maintenance cost, but also hardware costs
and supports the concept of Internet of Things (IoTs) by the
use of low cost energy meter with ESP8266 WiFi module
embedded to communicate with web-base gateway system
with existing server and capable of reading the data from
energy meter automatically in real time and update it for the
user to view the energy usage and reduce the cost of power
usage.
III. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
With the advancement of telecommunication and computer
technology, most of the power utilities are implementing many
levels of automation power management system across the
network. As we mention from the previous, the IoT is
expected to drive so many internet standardization efforts and
create the future with real world internet communication.
From the business perspective, the combination of technology
will lead to the solution for innovation and market efficiency
for new approach for IoT application development such as
structural monitoring, health monitoring, and home/office
automation and so on. The idea behind our proposed system is
to develop a very low cost WiFi-based digital energy meter
and integrate the IoT gateway for the industrial and
commercial energy monitoring. For the energy management
system, our proposed system will develop the web-based
application software for reading meter parameters such as
current, voltage, power in kW and kVar, and energy in kWh
and kVarh.
Fig.1. System architecture of the proposed WiFi-based single phase
energy meter for IoT
Fig. 1 shows the system architecture of the proposed WiFi-
based single phase energy meter for IoT. The system consists
of the ESP6288 WiFi-based single phase meter with TCP/IP
protocol for communication. The proposed system integrates
the embedded digital energy meter, IoT gateway, and web-
based system in the purpose of achieving an effective energy
management.
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IV. SYSTEM INPLEMENTATION
In our IoTs proposed system, the ESP8266 module is the
center processing unit of the system and responsible for
communication between the digital energy meter and gateway
web server in order to read the meter parameters and display at
the LCD and web server for the power management system.
There are two main parts in our system implementation
design, the first one is the digital energy meter with embedded
ESP8266 WiFi module and the second one is the gateway web
server for power management system. The architecture of our
proposed digital meter with WiFi module is shown in Fig. 2.
Fig.2. Digital energy meter’s architecture with ESP8266 Wi-Fi module
In our proposed system, the digital energy meter consists
of Arduino Leonardo Pro Micro - 5V/16MHz which is the
main function for calculating the meter parameter such as
current, voltage, power in kW, kVAr, and energy in kWh and
kVarh. The current sensor of the meter is able to operate with
the maximum of 30 Ampere, and it is designed to be easily
used with micro controllers, like the Arduino. This current
sensor device ACS712 can provide very low cost solutions for
AC current sensing for communication systems. This device
package allows for easy implementation, especially the
applications include load detection and management,
switching-mode power supplies, and over current fault
protection. The single phase voltage sensor unit is ZMPT
101B ultra micro voltage transformer with supply voltage of
5VDC, signal output of analog and small size with high
accuracy, good consistency for voltage and power
measurement. The sensor module voltage has 250VAC AC
maximum signal from an analog signal module. It can be
connected to the microcontroller's ADC pin used immediately
as Vref + 5V Arduino Leonardo. The real time clock module
DS3231 is a very low-cost with extremely accurate I2C real-
time clock (RTC). It is an integrated temperature-compensated
crystal oscillator (TCXO) and crystal. The device includes a
battery input, and maintains accurate timekeeping when main
power to the device is interrupted. The clock can operate in
either the 24-hour or 12-hour format with an AM/PM
indicator. There are programmable time-of-day alarms and
programmable square-wave outputs are provided. Address and
data are transferred serially through an I2C bidirectional bus.
The 16x2 LCD display module can describe 16 characters in 2
line display with black text on the green background. The
LCD has two registers for command and data. It is easily
5th International Electrical Engineering Congress, Pattaya, Thailand, 8-10 March 2017

programmable with no limitation of displaying. From the kVAr 002

following figure will show our proposed digital meter’s kWh 003
components on PCB board.
kVarh 004
Instantaneously 005
kW,kVAr,kWh,kVarh

TABLE III. THE RETURN COMMAND FOR READING KW

Start Meter ID Command Stop
! 001 Floating point ~
value with 3
decimal place

Fig.3. Digital energy meter The ESP8266 Wi-Fi is a very low cost Wi-Fi chip module
which produced by Shanghai-based Chinese manufacturer,
Espressif Systems, is a free-standing system on a chip with
integrated TCP/IP protocol stack that can give any
microcontroller access to Wi-Fi network. The ESP8266 can
function not only for hosting an application but also as
offloading all Wi-Fi networking functions from another
application processor. With pre-programmed with AT
command, ESP8266 module set firmware; it can simply hook
this up to Arduino device for Wi-Fi connection. One of the
best features of the ESP8266 is that it has on-board processing
and storage functionality that not only can be integrated with
the sensors and other IoTs devices through its GPIOs with
minimal development up-front and minimal loading during
runtime and also with high degree of on-chip integration
allows for minimal external circuitry, including the front-end
module, is designed to occupy minimal PCB area. The
ESP8266 supports Automatic Power Save Delivery for VoIP
applications and Bluetooth co-existance interfaces; it contains
a self-calibrated RF allowing it to work under all operating
conditions, and requires no external RF parts.

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT
In this section, we are going to demonstrate the load
Fig.4.The flowchart of energy meter
profile experimental results of reading meter parameters and
Figure 4 shows the operation flowchart of the digital show from the website.
energy meter by initializing the UART and LCD. The process
starts by setting the load profile for 15 minutes per time and
the energy will be calculating in every 1 millisecond. The load
profile data will be saved into EEPROM in order to make sure
for the power down time then the data will be saved into the
memory immediately. When the user wants to read the meter
parameter from the memory, the protocol of the system will be
showed in Table 1-3.
TABLE I. THE PROTOCOL FORMAT
Start Meter ID Command Stop
1byte 10 bytes 3 bytes 1 byte

TABLE II. THE COMMAND TABLE FOR THE METER PROTOCOL

Fig.5.Testing our proposed energy meter embedded ESP8266 Wi-Fi
Value to read Command of protocol module with 15W light bulb
kW 001

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5th International Electrical Engineering Congress, Pattaya, Thailand, 8-10 March 2017
Fig.6. Total value in Kwh
Fig.7. Total value in Kvarh
Fig.8. Demand value in Kw
Fig.8. Demand value in Kw
Fig.9. Demand value in Kvar
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Fig.10. Instantaneous value from the web-site
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have proposed the WiFi-based energy
meter for internet of things (IoT) with the low-cost
implementation. The proposed system can overcome and
improve the challenges of energy efficiency and
manageability. The parameters of energy meter can be read
correctly and reliably, such as load profile, demand value, and
the total enrgy consumption. For IoT implementation aspect,
the WiFi module ESP 8266 works reliably such that it can
send the information to display on the website throughout the
existing server. In summary, we can achieve the very high
reliability digital energy meter with very low cost, and it can
be monitoring just like standard energy meter. Our proposed
system can also be achieved with fewer complications steps
with ESP8266 WiFi module embedded into the meter with the
TCP/IP protocol for enabling communications between the
meter and web application. The future works will include the
performance improvement in terms of tamper detections and
outage notifications.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author would like to thank Assist.Prof Dr. Chaiyod
Pirak for his support, valuable suggestion during the research
and implementation and his encouragement for new challenge
in IoTs. The authors also would like to show and appreciate
Somchai Thepphaeng, for his expertise in IoTs applications.
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