Dear @maathe First of all, thank you for your comprehensive comments. you touched on several important point which I believe if properly addressed would increase the chances of developing a successful product. Allow me to respond to each of your points below.
- Regulatory:
We shall implement proper regulatory procedure to ensure typical industry standards are met during calibration and commissioning of the design. The accuracy of all reading will be compared to pre-existing meter, also the deviation to true value will be as little as possible because TRUE RMS reading codes will be used in ansi-c coding syntax, voltage and current will be kept as close as possible to pre-existing meter, as the hardware and software configuration will tailored to ensure compliance.
- Cost:
Cost is highly considered in the design factor, more reason why an 8bit commonly available microcontroller was selected alongside another easy to use 32bit microcontroller, instruction manual and design/assembly guide will be part of the deliverables, component cost and mouser/aliexpress link will also be included in the deliverables, this will help developers know how much is to be spent per meter, also design cost is highly affected by order quantity, currency, where component is bought from and other things beyond our control. Our target is that the cost of production will be lower than a comparable off the shelf meter.
3.GSM:
Thanks for highlighting the issue on poor network, however this issue has been addressed in previous comments. Due to RAM limitation on the 8bit atmega328p microcontroller, RF feature won’t be included, however on the 32bit version, RF feature and other serial communication protocol will be included.
The release of these two versions will enable end developers to make a choice of design that best fit their location and solve their problem.
4.GSM SIM cards:
We don’t think having one sim card per design is too much of an investment, almost everyone on planet earth uses a mobile phone with a sim card, which implies it is readily available and cheap.
However for users who may see sim card as an additional cost to the meter, they can opt for the FR enabled version with a base station as described in your comments.
- Power consumption:
The power consumption will vary from time to time, as GSM module draw about 2amps when connecting to network, however we don’t think this will be an issue technically or economically as even inverters have offload running wattage as little as 20watts for the best inverter design topology and it doesn’t affect operators technically or economically, however doing a cost comparison between how much power is used by the meter and how much the end user pay per KWH, it should justify the running power on the meter which is negligible during normal operation.
- Data protection:
Your point is noted. This is also a top priority topic for us and we will implement industry standard security protocols to ensure we meet high security levels. Each meter will have a unique identifier and access will be password protected.
7.Meter tampering option:
Different tamper proof topology will be employed from hardware to software to ensure the meter is tamper proof, more about this session will be made available in the operation manual for privacy purpose.
8.The code is made public to foster development which is the overall vision and mission of ENAccess. We believe before adoption and commercialisation of product using our open source design as a starting point, developers will need to customise codes to ensure protection. it is also possible to perform a comparison between power transmitted and power consumed for deviation, if deviation is noticed, the operator will pay a visit to the site.
