Arduino driven 5v and 12v Smartpower

I was updating my personal home “pico data center” in order to get more processing power (swarm cluster) and arrange all my ARM based servers in a cabinet.

I wanted to use only on power supply for all my servers (mostly arm based) instead of multiple 5v power adapters. I also had some 12v needs for my router and my NAS running an Odroid N1 (more to come about it in a future article…)

So I built a custom 1U rackable smart power which provides some remote services through HTTP… 

Features

The smart power actually has the following features :

• 5V 20A capacity
• 12V 8.5A capacity
• 6 USB connectors for 5V supply
• 2 Barrel connectors for 12V supply
• One temperature sensor
• Live display of power consumption and temperature
• Hardware switch to turn on or off any of the 8 power connectors
• “Cold” power-on sequence for all connectors (eg. turn on servers in the right order)
• Gather temperature and consumption history through REST API (json)
• Toggle any connector’s status thought HTTP command

Used Hardware

Support pieces

• A 19 inches 1U metal shelf for the base
• A small piece of wood (1cm thick) to fix all electronic parts
• Some wood skrews
• A piece of plastic I had to cover electronic parts (seems to be a fridge’s bottom grid…)
• A “U” in metal to fix the female main power plug

Electronics parts

• Two power supplies : one of 5V 20A and one of 12v 8.5A
• An Arduino Mega (more memory for data history)
• A W5100 ethernet shield
• A 8 relays board that provides a dedicated power line to drive relays
• USB and Barrel connectors
• A TM1638 Board (display + buttons)
• Cables (dupont, and others small ones)
• 2 HAL effect sensors rated for 20A
• A cheap DTH11 temp sensor
• Some prototyping boards
• A 40mm fan

Assembly

Soldering connectors and placing main parts on the shelf:

Preparing DTH11 and start wiring everthing:

Putting the fan and covering with the plastic grid:

Arduino sketch

Wiring plan

The following wiring plan is fully compatible with Nano and Uno. However, I used an Arduino Mega in order to have a bigger data history (more ram).

Code organization

The source code of the Arduino sketch if available on my github : https://github.com/jit06/smartpower

The code should be commented enough to make it easy to read and understand.

• SmartPower.ino : the main arduino sketch, kept small to drive the main logic
• Settings.h: contains all things that can be customized without touching a line of code
• Controller.cpp and Controller.h: code that allows to drive the TM1638 module
• Http.cp and Http.h: handle REST API to get json data and change relays’ states through HTTP queries
• Sensors.cpp and Sensors.h: handle hall effect and temperature sensors as well as in-memory data storage
• Timehandler.cpp and Timehandler.h: allow to set time via NTP in order to add a timestamp for each recorded value

Local Usage

Schema of how the smartpower hardware interface works:

Below a photo of the smartpower in action on my 19 inches cabinet:

 

Remote Usage (HTTP)

• “/” (default page) : gives a html page with live 5v and 12v power consumption (in Ah), total power consumption (in Watts) and current temperature
• “/TEM”: gives current temperature in JSON
• “/05V”: gives 5V live power consumption (Ah) in JSON 
• “/12V”: gives 12V live power consumption (Ah) in JSON
• “/PWR”: gives live total power consumption (Watts) in JSON
• “/ALL”: gives all previous values in one JSON
• “/HIS”: gives history of all values with timestamps in one JSON
• “/TGx”: where x between 0 and 7, toggles switch status if option is enabled (make sure to use it in a secure LAN, has there is no HTTPS support)

Sample of HTML page

Note that the default HTML page is refreshed automatically every 10 seconds (http header “Refresh: 10”).

Sample of “/ALL” response

Sample of “/HIS” response