DLMS/COSEM smart meters - Help on cabling

Hello to the community!

To our pleasure, at the last ESPHome firmware, support for DLMS/COSEM smart meters has been added!!

After reading the details, I contacted the local electricity distribution company. They were completely unaware of any of the technical stuff, they could not point me to a direction and,of course, they had no idea about the encryption key required etc. Hence, we’ll have to wait for a miracle or try to measure the electricity coming from the Grid via another method, such as detecting the blinking light of the meter.

As we were going throught the technical stuff mentioned in the component, we tried to locate a suitable connector to attach the cable coming from the Mbus converter to the meter. Going through the Google hits, we stumbled upon https://www.savefoundry.com/product-p-520051.html [USB To Near-infrared Converter Adapter IEC62056/1107/DLMS Transparent Transmission].
Is that cable suitable for connection to the meter?
Why “near-infrared” is mentioned? Isn’t a wired connection to the meter required?

Last but not least, we also have the smart Gas meter shown below:

Can anybody help on the type of plug required to connect ESPHome to the meter and which component could be used, with or without addition of extra hardware?

Your questions are not clear. If you have a method of reading the optical output, obviously wired connection is not required…

Let me clarify: the alternative way is to stick a light detector on top of the led that flashes as the meter is running and deduct the consumption from that. This would be a far more unstable and incomplete solution, as the wired connection/protocol provides a lot more data, with precision.

My question on the cable sent is whether this can be used directly to an ESP32 without any Mbus converter, would I require a USB-to-serial etc. The “near-infrared” is mentioned at the cable interface page, which was a question mark for me, as I thought that the connection to the meter should be wired.

As for the gas meter, I asked if anyone knows the kind of connector (and/or interfaces) is required to connect to it and retrieve similar information (consumption etc.)

You link to cable get’s blocked by my browser as phishing site.
Many ir-ports are programmable to output pulses/data/nothing. Yours has two windows. So likely the cable connects to that.