A Study On Hand-held Wireless Meter-reader

The number of meters has dramatically increased in residential communities as the pace of China's urbanization accelerated and the project of"One Household, One Meter"went on smoothly. It is estimated that there have been about 0.4 billion residential meters in China at present; and thus the power sectors are faced with a big issue to manage a great deal of residential consumption data systematically. The low-pressure centralized meter-reading technology tailored for meter reading has experienced 20 years'development in China but it has been in wide and large-scale use due to the bottleneck in communications.According to the relevant information, the out-of-dated hand-held reading meters carried simple fuctions, small storage capacity and importable operation. The modern hand-held reading meters function more powerfully and strongly than the old one, but they are vulnerable to external interference because of adoption of short-range wireless communication technologies such as infrared, bluetooth technology which lead to the short-range communication distance of hand-held reading meters. The paper reviewed and analyzed the study situation of hand-held reading meters home and abroad, made in-depth study on the overall structuring design and technology of wireless hand-held reading meter.1. Proposed overall structuring design of wireless hand-held meter-reading system composed of site unit and hand-held unit and used low-power radio technology and computer network routing technology to deal with door-to-door comsumption data reading in high-storey buildings.2. Completed the key code monitoring procedure design of hand-held unit, data transmission frame format design and human-computer interface design and achieved a display of LCD cascading menu, data communications of hand-held unit and site unit, hand-held unit's data communications with PC through USB.3. Explored to set up data table as back-up database by using Microsoft Access and uss Visual Basic to achieve some operations such as data reading, taking, preview, print.The wireless hand-held reading meters can not only meet the needs of electrical engineering, but also can be applied into meter reading for water, gas and random investigation into some industrial instruments, and therefore, they could produce broad prospects and good social and economic benefits.