Sensus water meter three-wire protocol

[Lancie1]

Yeah, that'd be a dream spot.

Here is a spot to dream about - a typical one of the many beaches. You even get to pick the color of your beach sand, from white, red, black, or green!

 

[boxofrelays]

Not bad -the picture. I've been on Oahu for 25 years now. It looks like this almost everyday. Volcanoes are only on the Big Island. Volcanic gasses sweep the Kona side of the island, now and then drifting over the ocean waters to the other islands. This gives us a, what it's like to live in LA feel. This doesn't happen too often, but when it does --who-boy! Land is quite reasonable to purchase on the Big Island (Hawaii) but very unreasonable on Oahu, Maui, and Kauai.

On the original conversation thread: I am using an XBee module from Digi (Rabbit) and the target collection device will be a tablet PC. The Sensus water meters are being installed by a general contractor. The software? Totally vapor-ware presently. I'll be glad to share info on this project as we dive into this. Using Steve Jobs maxim, "It has to look cool."

Regarding work on the islands? There are a lot of military bases on the islands and I get tagged to do some really bizarre projects all the time. If you do decide to make an exploratory move here, I recommend six months for investigative work. Be sure to bring sunblock, take surf lessons, and buy a few aloha shirts --actually you can buy those here. Ah yes, the tropical drinks. Many of the restaurants and bars claim to make the best Mai-Tai. My advice would be: Not to take them at their word, but to go to each and every one of these establishments and sample their concoctions.

-Chris

 

[boxofrelays]

Notes on my quote "march data out" -- it's synchronous data so a clock signal in and data bits out sort on an analogous reference to the physical characteristics of the actual serial connection, if you get my drift.

Volvagia720: I've looked at the attached reference sheet you included, but Sensus has dumped their protocol scheme on me for the water meters. Did you need feed back on the depth gauge from me with regards to depth and temperature data? The device you're describing is from ReefNet --looks to be an async port, completely different animal (a deep water electronic device, not a flow meter).

-Chris

 

[boxofrelays]

I do know a little about sensus protocol. It's uses three wires; one (red in my case) is power and clock, one (black) is common, and one (green) is data transfers send and receive.

There are a few things that I don't know.
How fast should the clock be going? Because it is the clock, I don't think I have to be right on for the device, but because it's power, I think I need to atleast ballpark the clock speed.

What kind of register do I need to send the device to get it to respond back with the data? One document I found states that a 0x00 should do it, but that document seems to show a more advanced device that uses sensus protocol.

Aloha Vovagia720;

The clock speed: I'm going to put a couple of the Sensus meters on the bench and run several variations of clock speed and data read. Are you working on a water meter project? I'll be glad to pass on our data if you need it. Let me know. Our project went live 5/31/2013 so we're pretty much green-lighted on program development. -Chris

 

[Lancie1]

Volcanoes are only on the Big Island.

What about the new island that is being formed by the moving volcanic vent in the ocean? I understand it will reach the surface in a few more years.

One tour guide told me that 2 or 3 acres of new land is formed each day by the Big Island volcano. I asked who owned the new land, but no one seemed to know for sure. I assume it will belong to the state government. Probably no one would want that new rock now - unitl a couple thousand more years have passed!

 

[boxofrelays]

Lo'ihi right off the big island. It's still under water. It might be a couple of thousand years before it breaks the surface. The University of Hawaii has a couple of manned deep-sea submersibles that check out the volcanic activity. One of my associates, here in Honolulu, designed and built the telemetry system using controllers from Digi and several VFD displays ordered from Digikey. They were going to use off the shelf PLCs but because of the tight quarters they opted to use the Digi (Rabbit) controllers.

Note: If it's new volcanic acreage it belongs to the state. If private property is suddenly extended by lava flows the extension gets owned by the state too!

 

[Lancie1]

If private property is suddenly extended by lava flows the extension gets owned by the state too!

No doubt. How could it be otherwise? After all, without the state it would not have got made, right? Making new land is one reason you have to pay them the big tax dollars!

 

[boxofrelays]

It's just that new land falls into the public domain. -Chris

 

[Lancie1]

It's just that new land falls into the public domain. -Chris

I can think of several legal arguments contrary to that. For example if someone owns a deed to land where the subsurface rights have not been sold off or tampered with, then that person has rights to a wedge of earth from the surface down to the center! If there happens to be some gold, diamonds, or magma down there that bubbles up and creates new surface land, then the original owner still owns all of it, legally.

However, the biggest dog in the pen usually gets the bone, right or not.

 

[flaron6]

Aloha Vovagia720;

The clock speed: I'm going to put a couple of the Sensus meters on the bench and run several variations of clock speed and data read. Are you working on a water meter project? I'll be glad to pass on our data if you need it. Let me know. Our project went live 5/31/2013 so we're pretty much green-lighted on program development. -Chris

Did you read the data from the Sensus meter via serial connection to a computer?

 

[scadametrics]

Aloha All;

I have an app I need to develop to march data out of a Sensus water meter. The Sensus water meter uses ASCII characters and is synchronous, as opposed to asynchronous like a serial port. The data is marched in and out via a clock signal. Has anyone on this site know what the ASCII codes are to send a request and receive the serial number and the meter data? I believe the data connection used is the same for the three-wire and two-wire interface. The lack of information on this protocol, on the internet is amazing. Any info would be greatly appreciated! -Chris (Honolulu, HI)

Hello Chris. I see that this is an old thread, but just noticed your question, and hopefully I can help. My company manufactures an instrument (EtherMeter) that can read (or "march the data out", as you put it) one or two Sensus-protocol water meters and converts the readings (both the total consumption reading and flow-rate) into Modbus and Allen Bradley protocols (serial and Ethernet). Hope this helps!

 

[nithinmoncy]

Interesting to note: SENSUS used to be owned by Rockwell International.

They don't use Electronic Communication Register(ECR) anymore. That was actually introduced by Rockwell back in 1984.

Since 2000 they've been using SENSUS Protocol, found inside SENSUS ICE Registers. The protocol is widely used in other manufacturers devices as well and these meters are generally used by utility companies to read and bill customers. They are often sealed, so they don't want any old Joe trying to commmunicate with them.

Whatever you are using to read from the meter has to generate the clock pulses to power and receive the data.
I think it's usually 5V in the order of 100's of Hz?

I've attached a picture depicting the Sensus Protocol ASCII structure.
ASCII requires data to be sent 10 bits at a time, so that's why you see:

7 DATA BITS, 1 START BIT, 1 STOP BIT, 1 PARITY BIT = 10 BITS(ASCII ENCODING)

Hope it helps Chris.

G.

----------EDIT BY PHIL: Attached image copied from page 11 of SCADAmetrics user manual found here:
http://scadametrics.com/PDF/EtherMeter_Manual_207.pdf ------------

Hi,
i used Sensus SRII/aS meter for data logging in a teram term.
used the followling:
7 data bits,
1 start bit,
1 stop bit, Even parity.
baud rate : 19200
can anyone helps me how to log the data to ter term or a microcontoller, where we using a tera term for that as of now.
when the water flows, does it logs the data ? or any protocol to sent it to Tx pin of the meter to read the water reading?

i tried in tera term, where im getting a junk value, while touching the Tx pin

pls help!

Thank you very much in advance.
-Nithin Moncy

 

[scirealm]

some people asked about the clock speed. i don't know for sure but i can post what worked for me:
I was doing 11.3kHz for a Badger water meter no problem, reading the entire message in about 47ms.
Then I switched to a Zenner meter and it couldn't keep up.
I reduced the speed and at about 2.8kHz the Zenner meter was barely starting to come through, still with a lot of bit errors. The Zenner started working correctly when I was at about 2kHz clock speed. To add my margin I cut this speed in half and the final speed came out to be 980Hz.

The thing that I'm not happy about Zenner is that the total time to read the meter increased from 47ms to 480ms and that's going to eat into my battery.

 

[OkiePC]

Hello Chris. I see that this is an old thread, but just noticed your question, and hopefully I can help. My company manufactures an instrument (EtherMeter) that can read (or "march the data out", as you put it) one or two Sensus-protocol water meters and converts the readings (both the total consumption reading and flow-rate) into Modbus and Allen Bradley protocols (serial and Ethernet). Hope this helps!

I can vouch for the the Scadametrics hardware. I have an Ethermeter connected to a radio modem via Etherent and an Octave meter speaking Sensus protocol iirc. The Micrologix 1400 which is the telemetry master at the other end of the radio link "thinks" the Ethermeter is just another Micrologix. It reads the flow rate and totalizer along with a few other data points in one tidy MSG packet.

We also bought the AMI duplexer for the sensus signals so they could keep the "drive-by" radio reader working since two different water districts still read the meter that way. We spent ~$1100 and saved about $1000 in Micrologix parts and no telling how much time and effort that would have been spent trying to modify a water meter to get "data to march out of it".