Pritesh's Blog

The ACS712 is very popular ic used to measure alternating current (ac). It comes in three variants which can measure ±5, ±20 and ±30 peak to peak current. Following specifications are important for calculation of minimum current that can be measured by ACS712.  Part Number  Optimized Range, Ip (A)  Sensitivity (Typ) (mV/A)  ACS712ELCTR-05B-T  ±5  185  ACS712ELCTR-20A-T   ±20  100  ACS712ELCTR-30A-T   ±30  66 Here, consider ADC resolution of an Arduino 10-bit, which is 1024 in decimal. Mostly, ADC reference voltage for Arduino is set to 5V. So, minimum voltage can be measured by Arduino is, 5/1024 = 4.88mV Therefore, actual minimum current can be measured by Arduino (considering ACS712ELCTR-20A-T) is, (4.88) / (100) = 0.0488 A peak-peak = 48.8 mA peak-peak The RMS value of minimum current can be measured by Arduino (considering  ACS712ELCTR-20A-T ) is, (48.8 mA peak-peak) / (√2) = 34.5 mA Results:  Table: minimum peak-...

I created this Serial Monitor program for one of my project in which I needed to present serial data but I did no want to keep the Arduino IDE open. I searched for an alternative, but most of the programs ware overwhelmed with features. I wanted a very simple and decent looking solution. So, I decided to create my own Windows Form Application in Microsoft Visual Studio IDE. The project is available on Github for you to download and you can also customize it from source code.

The main purpose for creating this library is to give an idea how a method is converted into a program and used in real life. The library has only one function which takes new sample and gives new RMS value. Note that the samples must be periodic sequential meaning the time delay between each sample is constant and all samples must be passed to the function. The library is available on github .