Design and construction of a high-precision electrical parameters monitoring system

Due to the increasing demand for monitoring electrical parameters in real time, many efforts have been recently made to develop different efficient data monitoring systems. This paper elucidates the design and construction of a low-cost Universal Serial Bus (USB) based electrical parameters monitoring system (EPMS) to measure various types of electrical parameters with visualization. In industry, it is essential to measure, acquire, and analyze generated or supplied AC RMS, peak or instantaneous voltage and frequency for different load conditions. In this research, a high-precision, cost-effective EPMS system is designed with a PIC18F4550 microcontroller, which is capable of performing these measurements. The designed EPMS has been tested with an application program developed in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, which allows real-time monitoring and display of the parameters.