Blog
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Website Update
It’s been quite some time since this website was updated, but that is not an indication that nothing is going on behind the scenes. Grid Insight is, and has been, focused on the needs of its customers, relying on word-of-mouth marketing to build the business.
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AMR gateway reference implementation
In response to several requests for a wireless utility meter receiver network relay solution (i.e., an AMR gateway), I spent some time last week working out a reference implementation of just such a thing. To keep costs down and maximize customizability, it uses an off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi running Linux as the host, coupled with a custom adapter board I designed to mate a Grid Insight® OV-1 “Oysterville” 900 MHz AMR receiver module to the Pi.
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Ciseco Slice of Pi adapter and OV-1 module
Though I have long known about it and recommended it to OV-1 integrators, I finally got my own paws on Ciseco’s Slice of Pi adapter board. (I bought it from Acme Unlimited for $7. This is an easy and affordable way to get a Grid Insight OV-1 receiver module (or any XBee-footprint device) hooked up to the UART and power pins of a Raspberry Pi.
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OV-1 Module Now Available
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Coming soon: Oysterville Board
A new Grid Insight AMR receiver module is getting ready to launch. w00t! Full details will be posted in due time, but you can see from the photo that this module is pin-compatible with the XBee. That means it will snap into any of the existing XBee-compatible breakout boards and shields (search at Adafruit, Sparkfun, etc.).
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Success reading Badger ORION meter signals
Over the past few months, Grid Insight has moved beyond Itron ERT-equipped utility meters and turned our attention toward Badger ORION water AMR endpoints. Of those we have tested, both in our lab and in several municipal field deployments, we have found all to follow the same modulation, data encoding, packet structure, and data validation scheme.
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Waning green
Out of curiosity, I recently spent some time banging keywords into Google Insights for Search and Google Trends, two tools that provide charts showing the popularity of certain terms in search queries and news reports. Of the numerous themes I explored, the trend that surprised me the most is the apparent waning of interest in green technology (a.k.a “cleantech”). Take, for example, the following search terms and phrases: “bike commuting”, “home solar”, “solar installation”, “home wind power”, “biofuel”, “hybrid car”, “plug-in hybrid”, “electric car”, and “prius”. In Google Insights for Search, each of these terms showed a dramatic peak in search interest in the summer of 2008, with declining interest ever since.
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Patent pending
We believe our method of receiving transmissions from Itron ERT-equipped smart meters represents a new market-shifting invention by enabling reception of ERT signals at significantly lower cost than is possible with the FPGA solution available from Itron. That’s why we have filed a patent application covering the technology with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
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First take on AMRUSB-1 data in Google PowerMeter
Here’s a quick report on the Grid Insight AMRUSB-1 and Google PowerMeter integration. I’ve made excellent progress building a general purpose Google PowerMeter client library in C, which will be useful to me but also useful to anyone else who wants to get data into PowerMeter with minimal hassle. I didn’t even look at the Microchip C reference code, instead just working from the Google’s docs. The result will be a GPL-licensed Google PowerMeter C client library suitable for running on PCs, in contrast with the Microchip library which was intended for use on embedded devices. I think I’m going to call the library “libgoogpm”, for lack of a better name. Suggestions, however, are welcome.
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Screencast: Installing AMRUSB-1 on Windows XP
This nine-minute video walks you step-by-step through the Windows XP installation and verification process for the AMRUSB-1 Utility Meter Data Receiver.
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New screencast video showing testing of AMRUSB-1 on Linux
To better help beta testing, customers, and potential customers understand the AMRUSB-1, I will be posting a series of screencasts on a variety of topics. The first one simply shows how to connect to the AMRUSB-1 from a Linux host using the AMRUSB-1’s native serial interface. I also demonstrate some of the receiver’s basic diagnostic commands.
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