Remote Meter Reading System For Heat Meters

With the rapid economy, urbanization becomes an inevitable trend in China. New towns’ construction takes opportunities and challenges for the household metering industry. The progress of technology supports remote meter reading system, improvement of living standard and policies like energy conservation have new demand. But the remote meter reading industry in China is beginning, there are no industry standards, and it can not meet the current needs of urbanization. In connection with user’s needs and the shortage of current remote meter reading system, the paper designed a remote meter reading system based on ZigBee and M-Bus(Meter Bus) technology, focusing on transmission mode of data and reducing the cost.The remote meter reading system designed in this paper includes management center, ZigBee data transmission module, concentrator, M-Bus interface module. First, in order to facilitate the preservation and process the meter data, the paper design management center by VB6.0, the management center’s function include of registering user’s information, reading meter by households, centralized meter reading, costing management, and use the Access database to manage meter data effectively.Second, the paper use ZigBee technology and build a wireless local area network to solve the transmission between the management center and concentrator.The paper designed the coordinator, routers, terminal nodes by using low power consumption processor MSP430F149and CC2420RF chip. To ensuring accuracy, security and real-time data transmission,the paper designed of wireless topology and the wireless communication program according to the communication protocol.Finally, the communication between concentrator and calorimeter is M-Bus.Designed the interface circuit and power supporting circuit for heat meters, and achieved continuous real-time measurement and meter reading.Experimental results show that:the meter reading system combined M-Bus with ZigBee wireless LAN chould ensure reliable transmission of data security and reduce operational costs and management complexity, and it will meet good prospects.