How to interface with this smart meter?

Hardware
21

Waiting for my custom pcbs and my atm90e36 ic’s. I find esphome and emonlib too slow to do the phase shift calcs.

22

Congrats :+1: Finally a real power/energy meter :muscle:

This way you will be finally able to have accurate active power and not (useless) apparent power readings. :zap:

Now this should cover some “real world scenarios” finally :wink:

23

Thanks, any other advice sweetheart? Or are you done stroking your ego?

24

For now I’m just using the oPower integration to get historical data. We plan on upgrading the system from 200A to 400A in the next few months and have ordered a few Powerwalls, so we’ll revisit the real time collection after all that work is done.

25

I have this meter with BGE. I can confirm that there’s an infrared LED in the optical port that will pulse every 1 Wh. From the manual:

4.1.1.1 Calibration LED

The optical port LED emits calibration pulses (infrared light) until the meter detects the presence of optical port PSEM communications. This LED is the source of watt hour and var hour calibration pulses. Each calibration pulse is equal to the value assigned to Kt (watt hours or var hours). The duration of each output pulse is approximately 25 milliseconds.

The default unit for the calibration pulses is watt hours. The meter may be switched to varh calibration pulses using MeterMate™ software.

My phone’s camera can’t pick up the pulses of the infrared LED like it can with other infrared sources. However, I took the infrared filter out of an old webcam to increase the range of infrared it can see, and the webcam can pick it up. This makes me think it’s more likely to be a 940nm IR LED than 810nm or 850nm, but I haven’t verified that.

I’m still researching whether to try to use a pulse counter like the Home Assistant Glow with an appropriate IR photodiode, or to pursue a CT clamp solution. I’m curious if anybody else is able to get a pulse counter working with this particular meter.

26

The first is kind of a energy meter the ct clamp is only a current meter. :chart_with_downwards_trend:

What you might actually want is a power meter :zap:

You can read more about the differences in this thread :point_up: