I just read about the water meter project today, so thought I would do a little investigation on my own to see what options I have.).
Our local water company already has a meter installed in my basement (Schlumberger E49N which is similar to a Neptune T10 meter) The meter is connected via three wires to a Star Hexagram AMR unit on the outside of my house. This is so that frequent meter reads can be done on my water consumption remotely from the local authority, in a neighborhood meter aggregation point. All in a all a very tried and tested common (albeit one way ) communication and meter read solution....
Rather than cut the water pipe and look at inserting another meter, I thought it might be worthwhile digging around to see if there was any way to utilize or tap into the signal being generated at the source (ie the meter has screw wiring terminals on its body) and just somehow use that raw signal. I think that the terminals are for ground, RX and TX but have no real way to confirm, not what the actual 'ECR' protocol actually looks like. I suppose if there were some spec for the protocol that would help...
Anyone have any ideas ? Ideally - it might actually be useful to figure what the common protocols are between 'meter' and 'AMR pad' and perhaps created widgets for those digital signals. I know Sensus has its own protocol, Itron of course can read many different types of pieces of equipment....(kWH Smart meters, Gas Meters etc)..
Ideas
Worthwhile looking into .... happy to assist !
