Joule Meter: High Resolution Measurement of Energy Consumed

[electronupdate]

 I am doing some work where I need to know exactly the amount of energy consumed by a circuit.  I could not find any commercial solution which does this so I made my own. [Does such a commercial solution exist which has the resolution of at least 0.01 Joules?]

A Joule is a watt-second.... by using a Arduino Uno which comes with some built-in 10 bit A/D converters and running a timer based interrupt to measure every 100 ms I was able to get the resolution I needed.  The front-end is a bit simplistic but it was good enough for me to evaluate two different design approaches.

Video at this link:

[Marco]

TI has energy trace that's about it for commercial solutions.

Ton of academic papers about instrumenting switching power supplies for energy consumption measurement though (the quantized nature of the energy transfer makes things a lot easier).