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Nice, thanks for sharing! I'll have to check this out. Not sure how I missed hearing about this one when I was working on understanding the mesh network protoco

by heywire 10y ago

Nice, thanks for sharing! I'll have to check this out. Not sure how I missed hearing about this one when I was working on understanding the mesh network protocol for the water and electric meters on the side of my house. Aside from GNU Radio, which has already been mentioned, Inspectrum also proved to be invaluable to me.

kvajjha 10y ago
Can you elaborate on the mesh network part? I've recently discovered mesh networking. What do you recommend as a good beginner project?
- heywire 10y ago
  Sure. The electric and water meters used by the city I live in are by a company called Elster. They use the name EnergyAxis or EA_LAN to describe the mesh network. Either of those should return hours of reading material on a Google search. The short version is that each electric meter communicates on the ISM 915MHz band using the Texas Instruments CC11xx chip, and relays messages from meter to meter until it reaches the "gatekeeper", which is tied to a WAN and to the city's infrastructure.
Xeoncross 10y ago
Can you share any work on this? I would love to read the electric meter readings.
- heywire 10y ago
  Sure. If you have an Elster brand meter, you can check out my (incomplete) project ea_receiver [1] or a GNU Radio based project, gr_elster [2]. For other brands, I would check out the rtlamr [3] project. I'm using it to read my gas meter. Finally, if you're into this sort of thing, check out rtl_433 [4]. You'd be amazed how many things are silently communicating all around you. Note: my work on ea_receiver has stagnated, as my city recently completed an upgrade to their system which unfortunately included enabling message encryption. [1] https://github.com/shaunhey/ea_receiver [2] https://github.com/argilo/gr-elster [3] https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr [4] https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
  - Xeoncross 10y ago
    Makes sense. My email might be public, but at least my water meter is encrypted.

by heywire 10y ago

kvajjha 10y ago

Can you elaborate on the mesh network part? I've recently discovered mesh networking. What do you recommend as a good beginner project?

heywire 10y ago
Sure. The electric and water meters used by the city I live in are by a company called Elster. They use the name EnergyAxis or EA_LAN to describe the mesh network. Either of those should return hours of reading material on a Google search. The short version is that each electric meter communicates on the ISM 915MHz band using the Texas Instruments CC11xx chip, and relays messages from meter to meter until it reaches the "gatekeeper", which is tied to a WAN and to the city's infrastructure.

Xeoncross 10y ago

Can you share any work on this? I would love to read the electric meter readings.

heywire 10y ago
Sure. If you have an Elster brand meter, you can check out my (incomplete) project ea_receiver [1] or a GNU Radio based project, gr_elster [2]. For other brands, I would check out the rtlamr [3] project. I'm using it to read my gas meter. Finally, if you're into this sort of thing, check out rtl_433 [4]. You'd be amazed how many things are silently communicating all around you. Note: my work on ea_receiver has stagnated, as my city recently completed an upgrade to their system which unfortunately included enabling message encryption. [1] https://github.com/shaunhey/ea_receiver [2] https://github.com/argilo/gr-elster [3] https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr [4] https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433
- Xeoncross 10y ago
  Makes sense. My email might be public, but at least my water meter is encrypted.