The Design Of Automatic Meter Reading System Based On Zig Bee And GPRS

With the development of science and technology, the demands of people’s living and working environment are higher and higher. Convenient and efficient is the way that people want living and working to be. Wireless communication technology arises at the historic moment, and is applied in home appliances, industrial instrumentation and so on. Some kinds of time-consuming work becomes easily and quickly to be done now by the application of wireless communication technology. But at present, most areas in China, the meter reading work of water, electricity and gas still adopts the traditional way of manual transcription. As the household electric meter reading, there are some of automatic meter reading systems by smart meters through the cable transmission, but the cables laying also brings some other problems. The traditional way of instrument meter reading is laborious or consuming fund and resources, which limits the level of China’s electric power informatization development and the setting of advanced management decision.The core of the meter reading system designed in this paper is using the wireless communication technology to send the electric meter data to the designated equipment. Through the RS485 serial port users’ meters are connected to the data acquisition terminal which is placed in the unit building, and the terminals transfer the data to the network coordinator which is placed in the community. The network coordinator will finally transfer the data to the meter reader’s hand-held devices and the computer of electric power administrative departments. This system mainly includes two parts as the data acquisition terminal and the network coordinator. Data transmission between the data acquisition terminal and the network coordinator is through the short-range wireless communication technology, and the data eventually send to the destination is through the remote wireless communication technology. The ZigBee technique which was developed in recent years, is used as the short-range wireless communication technology, and the GPRS network is used as remote wireless communication technology, through the SMS and TCP/IP services offered by the GPRS sent the data to the target device.Based on the analysis of the characteristics of ZigBee and GPRS communication technology, completes the hardware circuits and software codes about the data acquisition terminal and the network coordinator. Because of the data acquisition terminal and network coordinator hardware circuit has a certain amount of repeatability, so the hardware adopts the modular designing method. Finally, the hardware module and the program code is tested by experiments. The results show that the system designed in this paper can realize the remote wireless meter reading which was expected.