Design Of Meter Reading Systems

Recently, most of the urban residents pay their bills to water company staff, whoread the water meters door by door to households. This mode of paying bills is awaste of manpower, material as well as financial resources. It inevitably causesdeviations and troubles to residents’ life. Considering the rapid development of oureconomy that has made people from rural areas flow into cities and an increasingnumber of apartments built up, the traditional mode of reading meter s door by door isnot efficient or effective enough any more, therefore, a new mode of reading meterappears—the centralized reading. The present paper is designed to use the low-cost,high-performance ARM-Cortex M3as the main control chip of the centralized readingsystem, transmit data from water meters to a concentrator through RS485, and fromconcentrators to the master station through GPRS wireless communication network.GPRS wireless network has the feature of being on-line all the time and easy to install,making it possible to transmit data from the water meters to the master station toachieve control and management in a wide area. The present paper uses thecross-connected communication network with communication between a concentratorand a water meter in the longitudinal direction and communication betweencommunications between concentrators in the lateral direction. This design has theadvantage of low cost, stable performance, easy installation, etc. The concentrator, thecore of the centralized reading system, performs the function of receiving orders fromthe master station and transmitting data from reading meters to the master stationthrough wireless network. In this paper, the author first introduces the background anddevelopment, the constituents, features and function of reading meter technology.Then the author introduces the principles, structures and communication modes ofconcentrators from two aspects—hardware and software; he presents theconfiguration of hardware and the working principles of each units in detail with itsblock diagram, the flow chart of the whole program, communication protocolsbetween a concentrator and water meter as well as that between concentrators.