Texas Instruments Connects The Smart Grid With Smart Meter System
A new Smart Meter Board from Texas Instruments lets developers customise their design tools, hardware and software to their exact needs.
Developers can add multiple connectivity, processor and metrology options to their smart meter designs.
The board supports one-phase to three-phase smart electricity meters with the smart grid's most prolific communications protocols. The Smart Meter Board (SMB) is an innovative development platform that incorporates key smart grid devices from TI's portfolio of embedded, analogue and connectivity solutions to demonstrate the capabilities of a smart meter.
The SMB is a modular and scalable environment that lets developers include multiple wired and wireless communication protocols. These include power line communication (PLC), near field communication (NFC), Wi-Fi, sub-1GHz and 2.4GHz ZigBee Smart Energy Profile (SEP) on e-metering and pre-payment metering applications to showcase automatic meter reading (AMR) and automatic metering infrastructure (AMI) systems.
Developers using the Smart Meter Board development platform benefit from TI's robust smart grid software libraries when implementing key communication standards and typical utility meter functions. The software libraries, combined with TI's Smart Meter Board, let developers choose which development tool matches their project needs.
TI's recently announced Smart Meter system-on-chip (SoC) is compatible with the Smart Meter Board system and can be plugged into the board for development and expand the functionalities of the SoC.
The board supports processors ranging from ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers to Cortex-A8 processors. It also enables low-power RF (sub-1GHz and 2.4GHz ZigBee) implementations connecting a meter to a home area network (HAN) for short-range communication.
SMB also provides supports PLC for PRIME/G1/G3/P1901.2 for low-frequency narrowband communication.
What's more, NFC capabilities introduce options for pre-payment of energy.
Wi-Fi capability allows smart meters to connect to an IP network so customers can communicate with the smart meter through a Wi-Fi-connected computer, smartphone or tablet, without the additional cost and complexity of a gateway.
Easy software integration with support for TI Smart Grid software libraries, including ZigBee SEP 1.x and 2.0, WMBUS, 802.15.4g, one-phase/two-phase metrology, THD, DLMS, pre-payment, MIFARE and encryption.
The Smart Meter Board is available immediately for sampling from TI sales representatives, where pricing information is also available.
Texas Instruments will be demonstrating and distributing samples of the Smart Meter Board at the Metering Europe 2012 Expo in Amsterdam, Netherlands, between October 9th and 11th at booth #G30.
