Remote Electricity Meter Reading System

Nowadays the remote automatic meter reading system has become an important option to manage, analyze and process the power consumptions for power administrative departments. This project of "Remote automatic meter reading system in rural areas" originates form one of the horizontal co-operation projects between Guizhou University and the power enterprise, which is comprised of three components, i.e. the subscriber carrier watt-hour meter, the concentrator and the background management system. This graduation thesis has focused on the concentrators of the system mentioned above, whose main contents are as follows: After receiving the control demands from the background management system, the concentrator collects relevant information by the carrier watt-hour meters and transmits the data to management system. The aim of the project is to provide the rural remote automatic meter reading system with more comprehensive theoretical and technical supports, based on the researches in depth on the software and hardware design philosophy of the concentrator.Based on the retrospection of historic and up-to-date developments of embedded technologies and the functional requirements of concentrators, combining with the development situations of relevant technologies home and abroad, the author of this graduation thesis has put forward his design proposals and accomplishing methods of the embedded concentrator, which consists of seven parts, including clock modules (CLKM), large-scale storage units, power-line data transmission, communications by telephone, RS485 communication, RS232 communication and main processing unit. The hardware system has been constructed by taking advantage of vulgate embedded technologies, also by applying the standardized ARM Chips (S3C4510B of ARM7TDMI Series) and piggybacking peripheral extended components (Such as power modules, working clocks, repositions, RS232 actuators, Ethernet actuators, Flash,SDRAM, JTAG interfaces etc). Debugging has also been conducted in the system on relevant modular units in order to fulfill the concentrator requirements of the whole system. The software system design has been realized by selecting ADT embedded developing platform (ARM Developer Tools, ARM Development Tools), consisting of two basic function modules, i.e. the communication and control modules of power-line data transmission both between the concentrators and the reading meters, and between the background processors and the concentrators. The direct application of assembly language and the programming in accordance with the national criteria and the agreements with China Southern Power Grid, various approaches to dealing with abnormal situations have been taken into consideration to ensure the accurate and reliable running of the concentrator.The author of the graduation thesis has summarized the technical characteristics of the complete set of system and given detailed instructions of the aspects awaiting optimizations and extensions. By conducting detailed researches on this project, the requirements for the concentrator have been met fundamentally. Systematical researches have also been conducted on the system selections and software implementations, aiming at providing important reference basis for designing the physical unit.