This project aims at building an ultra low power adapter (< 1uA quiescent current) that you can bring onto modern smart energy meters to read the energy usage.

The optical interface consists of an IR photodiode to read data from the smart energy meter, and an IR emitter to send data to the smart energy meter. The infrared reader has an automatic calibration to ambient light conditions to be more resilient against ambient infrared light.

4 wires: VCC, GND, RX and TX. RX is for receiving UART data from a microcontroller, TX is for sending the optical data to a microcontroller. So usually you want to connect TX to the UART input of your microcontroller to get your readings from the smart meter. RX can be left unconnected if not used. The supply voltage may be between 1.8V and 5.5V.

The project started when my mechanical Ferraris energy counter was replaced with a digital smart meter from eBZ. The DD3 model provides an IR signal which can be read once a second with a simple IR receiver. Initially I used just an Arduino with a photo transistor circuit on a breadboard to read the signal. Later I have built an IR dongle on a real PCB in a nice case for permanent mounting on top of the smart meter.

For the software side, the Smartmeter program reads the raw stream of data from the energy meter and forwards it as a JSON formatted string to a MQTT broker on the network. The data is stored in a TimescaleDB database and visualised on a Grafana dashboard.

In the AUR.

A huge collection of IR remote control databases for the Flipper Zero. Covers an amazing array of devices, from master remote controls for hotels to laser disc players to bidets.

A huge collection of infrared interaction patterns for all kinds of devices. Load them onto a Flipper Zero and have a good time.