Power Outage Logger

I finally got around to taking some pictures and writing up this project that I did last year. Read more about it on my lousy blog.

That's a great idea. In some areas you can receive financial compensation from the energy distributor when outages exceed a certain length of time - easily tracked with your project.

Hope its battery powered!
Nice piece of timber
Could you get a 9Volt on there too?

Nice!

Appreciate the comments.

tytower:
Hope its battery powered!

LOL, well just the RTC, coin cell on the flip side of the breakout board. The outage is actually logged at the time power is restored, so the data isn't available until after the fact. I do have another lash-up (that predates this project) that sends an SMS notification when a power outage occurs, that one is entirely battery-backed, but has quite a few more moving parts. So I already had power outage logging covered, but this seemed like such a neat and self-contained thing that I couldn't resist, plus a friend was interested in building a couple.

And let me guess - you know when the outage started because you keep a running record of the current known time in the RAM on the RTC and when power returns, look at that first to see how long it was?

Paul__B:
And let me guess - you know when the outage started because you keep a running record of the current known time in the RAM on the RTC and when power returns, look at that first to see how long it was?

Not quite, actually the logging of individual outages is a feature of the MCP79412 RTC I'm using.

On power-up, the code reads the power-down and power-up timestamp registers in the RTC. These times are then stored back into the RTC's battery-backed SRAM as a log that can hold several entries.