Project Title:

GSM based Remote Reading System for Electronic Energy Meters

Problem Statement
High voltage power transmission utilities are charged with transporting power from the generating companies to their respective customers distributed over wide spread areas. The manual approach to metering and billing involves staff moving around physically reading each meter and delivering the data to a central location for another manual process of billing. This is prone to human errors, delays, high operational costs and inaccurate reports. Therefore, this project seeks to utilize GSM technology and telecommunication infrastructure to come up with a prototype of a GSM based tool which enforces automatic meter reading, timely billing and invoicing of high voltage power utility customers. This is considered to be a significant step towards solving the problems resulting from manual operations and put to use the otherwise underutilized telecommunication infrastructure in the said utilities.

The Organisation
Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Ltd (UETCL) commenced its operations on 1st April, 2001 as a limited liability company. The UETCL Annual Report 2001 indicates that UETCL inherited a transmission system that comprises 1166 km of 132 kV and 66 kV transmission lines with 34 metering points in 12 substations. Since each meter has a corresponding check meter, the meters to be read total up to 68. The Energy sales section is responsible for the production of operational statistics especially in the area of energy sales, purchases and losses. It generates projections and forecasts on performance as well as reading the meters and billing. The section is responsible for analysing and monitoring performance trends to explain variances. Unfortunately Information Technology has not reliably been applied in the sections operations particularly in metering and billing. The whole practice is characterized by errors, delays and cost escalations.

Project Objective
The general objective of the project is to develop a GSM based tool for efcient metering and billing in high voltage power utilities.

Scope of the project

The study will be conducted at the UETCL headquarters located at Plot 10 Hannington Road in Kampala, as the central collection point of meter readings and host of the billing system. The implementer/researcher will focus on the control Centre at Lugogo and Mutundwe substation to demonstrate that the existing communication infrastructure coupled with GSM technology can be applied to simplify metering and billing. The substations were selected in such a way as to cater for all the available communication media and infrastructure on the high voltage power grid.

Project Summary
The purpose of this project is to automate the remote monitoring and control of commercial Energy Meters. This system enables the Electricity Transmission Company to read the meter readings regularly without the person visiting each metering point. This can be achieved by the use of microcontroller unit that continuously monitors and records the Energy Meter readings in its permanent (non-volatile) memory location. This system also makes use of a GSM modem for remote monitoring and control of Energy Meter. The Microcontroller based system continuously records the readings and the live meter reading can be sent to the Head offices of Electricity Transmission Company on request. A dedicated GSM modem with SIM card is required for each energy meter. In this project we will interface 89c51 microcontroller with a blackberry GSM mobile phone to decode the received message and do the required action. The protocol used for the communication between the two is AT command. The microcontroller pulls the information from the meter by use of a modem, decodes it, recognizes the mobile number and then switches on the relays attached to its port to control the phone through SMS.

Block diagrams

For presentation and flexibility purposes, in our prototype, this diagram will be as shown below with the phone receiving the SMS message with meter readings to replace the Utility Billing server. GSM modem Energy meter

8051 microcontroller

Project Requirements/ Components

Hardware Used:

AT command supporting GSM mobile phone. 89c51 Microcontroller Max 232 IC. DB9 Connector GSM Phone
Software Used: 1. Keil u-Vision Keil Software is used provide you with software development tools for 8051 based microcontrollers. With the Keil tools, you can generate embedded applications for virtually every 8051 derivative. The supported microcontrollers are listed in the -vision. 2. PRO51 Programmer Software

Software/Hardware Implementation Description

The proposed remote metering system will be composed of several remote meters and a central server as shown below. The remote meters which are placed in apartments or in substation exchange information with the central server by SMS using GSM networks for cellular phones. Both postpaid and prepaid billing scheme are feasible to implement using this architecture.

As per prototype, the Central Server will be replaced by a GSM compatible mobile phone.

1. Remote Meter The remote meter mainly consists of a micro-controller unit, a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD), an Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EEPROM), Real Time Clock (RTC), an Energy Measuring Module (EMM), Temper detection unit, Latching Relay (LR) and a GSM modem as shown in Figure 2.

Microcontroller Unit An 8051 architecture micro-controller (AT89C55WD) is used as the microcontroller unit. The 8051 is an 8 bit Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) microcontroller. It is one of the most popular microcontrollers in the world for its high performance, rich instruction set (MCS-51), and low cost. It has four 8 bit ports, total 32 I/O lines. Different peripherals of the meter are connected with its ports as shown in Figure 2. It has 64KB of program memory and 256 byte of RAM. The firmware inside the microcontrollers program memory is built using two layers the Driver Layer and the Application Layer. The Driver Layer contains protocols for accessing different hardware peripherals such as LCD, EEPROM, EMM, RTC, LR, GSM modem, etc. On the top of the Driver Layer, the Application Layer contains routines for load calculation, bill calculation, data SMS frame creation, etc. Application Layer calls different routines of the Driver Layer to access hardware peripherals. Display Unit A 16 x 2 character LCD (HD44780) is interfaced with the micro-controller port using 4 data wire mode. Different meter readings like current month kWh, total kWh, voltage, current, date, time, etc. are sequentially displayed here. Permanent Data Storage Unit If power fail occurs, the content of the RAM must be stored in EEPROM so that when power is back, the meter can start from its last state. An I2C EEPROM (AT24C64) of 8KB size is used for this purpose. Also, different billing slabs containing rates for peak and off peak hour, meter ID etc. are stored here. Real Time Clock

An RTC (DS12C887) is used to get the current date and time information. The RTC has a lithium battery inside it which is used to run the clock even if the power is off. Energy Measuring Module The energy measuring module (ADE7753) is used to get the voltage, current, power factor, kWh, etc. information of the connected single phase load. A Current Transformer (CT) and a Potential Transformer (PT) are connected with the EMM to sense the current and voltage respectively. The microcontroller gets different information by reading different resister values of the EMM. Relay Unit A Latching Relay (LR) is used for connecting and disconnecting power supply to the customers load. The microcontroller sends signals to the LR input signal pins to control the relay contacts. GSM Modem A GSM modem is interfaced with the micro-controller's serial (RS232) port for sending and receiving SMS. Using the FBUS protocol [3][5][10], the microcontroller sends different commands to the modem and receives data SMS frames from the GSM modem. The serial communication with the modem is full duplex 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit and at 115200 bauds. We have used Grameen [6] Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) in the modem. Temper Detection Unit If any unauthorized person tries to open the meter box even if the meter has no power, the temper detection unit will activate using a 4.5 volt battery and the meter will not let any power to flow to the customer. An SMS is automatically sent to the central server reporting the temper.

2. The Mobile Phone This will use the service providers SMS service to receive the message sent by the GSM Modem.