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Zigbee sniffer and smart electricity meters

Thomas Price1
Prodigy 10 points

Part Number: CC2531

We have recently had a smart electricity meter installed.  There should also have been a smart gas meter, but it was unable to communicate with the electricity meter, presumable because of range - about 13m.  Also we do not have an in home display (IHD), again because of distance.  We live in a residential block, where the electricity meters are on the ground floor and the gas meters are distributed around the perimeter of the building.  Not very unusual, but it seems that the SMET's designers did not take such an arrangement into account when designing the meters.  I am wondering whether the meters could be incorporated into a ZigBee mesh network, and whether some appropriately  placed routers would provide a path for the home area network (HAN) communication between gas and electricity and electricity and IHD.  As a partial step towards investigating this I would like to use a CC2531 sniffer to detect the signals from the electricity meter.  I have flashed a CC2531 with 'sniffer_fw_cc2531.hex' and have used it with SmartRF Sniffer.  I am picking up a signal, but am not sure what it means.  I had hoped to incorporate an image of the screen, but am not sure how to do this.  There are two smart electrcity meters in the meter room, so I need to identify the signals from each meter.

Any thoughts about whether my suggested scheme would be possible, and anything about the data format of the electricity meter data, and also about how I should incorporate an image. would be much appreciated.

Eddie Price

  • 0
    TI__Mastermind 35070 points

    Hi,

    The scheme itself seems like a good fit for a Zigbee mesh network, as long as all devices share the same Zigbee profile.
    Since the meters are already installed, you'd need to consider the following:
    - the wireless protocol the meters are currently using
    - feasibility of a firmware upgrade
    - wireless capabilities of the devices' radios (what PHY, etc)

    The sniffer should be able to pick up packets as long as you choose the channel which the devices are operating on.
    As the devices may not be using a well known wireless protocol, it would be difficult to interpret the over-the-air packets. Even if the format was known, the packets may be encrypted to some extent.

    In general, I would suggest contacting the manufacturer of your smart meters to get more information and any troubleshooting.

    Regards,
    Toby

  • 0
    Guru 735695 points

    You can ZIP your sniffer log and use “rich format” to attach it. However, as Toby suggest, it might be difficult to interpret without knowing some details of what profile and encryption the meters use.