On 30/11/11 10:30, Mark Rogers wrote:
I assumed the light interface was just a pulse counter, ie useful for counting the energy as it's used, but not useful for taking the current reading?
The ones I have seen support a two way conversation that supports taking a full reading and even reprogramming some features of the meter, Although I have heard that some of this functionality may be password protected. I think when they recieve no requests they perhaps fall back to the unit count mode.
Communication runs at 300 baud and perhaps inventive people could convince IRDA hardware to talk to it if they were so inclined in a purely investigative and non fraudulent manner.
I think they mostly use IEC1107 which means you could just pay BSI for a copy of the documented transmission protocol. If you wanted to take a look then I would try and obtain a copy of BS EN 62056-21.