Data & analysis

EcoMonitor

Live power monitoring for CNC machine tools, built for the ECOPROGRAM energy-efficiency project supported by the Tuscany Region.

Tools: C++ · Qt · MariaDB
Outcome: In production

Context

EcoMonitor was developed in 2011/2012 as part of the ECOPROGRAM project, funded by the Tuscany Region. Its purpose was to record and display the power draw of the motors driving a CNC machine during specific, significant machining operations, in order to optimize their energy consumption.

The measurement devices — three-phase analysers on the spindle and axis drives, a fieldbus node on the control cabinet — were distributed across two separate physical buses. Their topology was configured through an XML file.

What I built

The software, built on and for Windows, sampled at a configurable fixed period and plotted the readings live, letting an operator annotate the plot with what they were observing.

Data was recorded to a MySQL database, so it could be reviewed later and analyzed at leisure — including with other tools, thanks to CSV export.

Disclaimer

The original 2012 Windows software was ported to Linux and modernized with the help of Claude (Anthropic), via Claude Code. The video was produced using this ported version, with a simulator standing in for the real data.