Matthew Liberty and his team of engineers at Jetperch LLC work with the consumer electronics, telecommunication and manufacturing industries, developing hardware and software applications. One issue that popped up consistently was the need to measure energy consumption during product development, and the poor choices available. The group developed the Joulescope as a cost effective and user friendly precision energy meter and have a Kickstarter campaign running to fund the first round of production parts.
Joulescope measures instantaneous voltage, current, power and energy while also displaying waveforms of voltage, current, and power over time. The team believes that pulling features from the multimeter and the oscilloscope will give developers a better idea of their products in real time. The scope connects to a computer, the power source, and the device being tested. The software for Joulescope is open source and available on GitHub, with a full User’s Guide already available at the product’s website. The firmware for the scope is upgradable and open source designs for a customizable front face are on the GitHub as well.
The scope runs at a voltage range of -1 to 15 Volts, -1 to 3 Amperes, with a resolution on 1.5 nanoAmperes. Two million current and voltage samples per second can be measured, and the system has a 250 kiloHertz bandwidth. Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux software are supported by the scope. A detailed FAQ section on the produt’s website discusses the decisions made regarding the scope’s banana jacks vs BNC connectors.
Joulescope definitely has a purpose as a product development tool but I can also see several uses for it in the manufacturing lab or our robot design and build area. Beyond having an extremely cool name, Matthew Liberty holds several patents in the realm of 3D pointing and made this amazing video discussing the current and voltage considerations when you lick a 9 Volt battery. The campaign is already successfully funded and ends on March 21, 2019.