Application of Ethernet Control Chip in Smart Meters

With the awareness of energy conservation and environmental protection becoming more and more popular, the concept of smart grid has become a global hot topic. Interest in smart grids around the world is gradually increasing. Since 2001, the United States has been building smart grid infrastructure to replace The old power system and enhanced waste management of energy, this project is expected to be completed by 2030, EPRI, EDF, Hitachi, GE and some major US power companies are involved in this business. Since 2006, the European Union government has been leading the project "European Smart Grid Technology Platform". This project will be completed in 2020. Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and Spain are all actively supporting this project. ABB, Siemens and Shell are all participating in the project. This business.

The main feature of smart grid technology is the integration of power network and IT real-time data communication technology. Smart grid users can make reasonable use of power resources. This not only avoids energy waste, but also saves electricity costs for users.

Smart Grid System

Efficient selection of smart instrumentation

Smart meters are the core equipment of smart grid infrastructure. Through the network, smart meters remotely transmit real-time power consumption to power companies and receive price information. In addition to the traditional smart meters, which include real-time clocks, sensors, and displays, smart meters must have the ability to communicate to distant servers. The smart meters must be classified into wired and wireless transmission media.

In the wired communication mode, Ethernet, power lines, PSTN, etc. can all be used as communication interfaces. In the wireless communication mode, there are mainly ZigBee, RF, wifi, infrared and other methods. The communication mode can be selected according to different communication environments.

All smart meters are very similar in clocks, sensors, and displays, but the communication part has different communication methods because of different transmission media. If a meter is to support all modes of communication, the price of such a meter device will be very expensive and not suitable for a wide range of applications. So, what kind of communication can be the most effective solution? The most common interface in an embedded system is a serial port, so instrumentation devices can also use the serial port to communicate with other modules. We can use serial to Ethernet and serial to ZigBee converters to connect existing electronic instrumentation devices and upgrade them to smart instrumentation.

Beijing Boxun's Application in Intelligent Instrumentation

First, serial to Ethernet communication mode:

Serial to Ethernet Communication Mode Structure

W5100 Chip - Full Hardware Embedded Ethernet Controller Chip

characteristic:

1. Support hardware TCP/IP protocol: TCP, UDP, ICMP, IGMP, IPv4.

2. ARP, PPPoE, Ethernet

3, support 4 independent ports (sockets) connected at the same time

4, embedded 10BaseT/100BaseTX Ethernet physical layer

5, internal 16K bytes of memory for TX / RX cache

6, support SPI interface, direct bus and indirect bus interface

7, 3.3V operating voltage, I/O port can withstand 5V voltage

8, small LQFP80 lead-free package

EFM32 Chip - Ultra-Low Power ARM Cortex-M3 Microcontroller

characteristic:

1, 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 core, the highest frequency is 32MHz

2, 90 GPIO, 20mA drive, 16 external interrupts

3, CPU sleep, the peripherals can work independently

4, Up to 6 UARTs, Supporting UART and SPI Modes

5, 12-bit ADC, 1MHz, 8 channels

6, 12-bit DAC, 500KHz, 2 channels

7, voltage range: 1.8-3.0VDC

8, industrial temperature: -40 °C -85 °C

Second, serial port to ZigBee communication mode:

ZigBee communication mode block diagram of serial port