on the trail of the elusive Power Cost Monitor signal

Catherine probably thought I was acting no more strangely than usual last night, when I was holding the Power Cost display unit in one hand, frobbing the electric stove control with the other, all the while watching a digital clock and cackling gently to myself.

All this makes me think I’m a bit further on with getting something from the Power Cost Monitor. Previous attempts using cheap wireless units (and cluelessness on my part — never forget that) got nothing, so I caved and bought the rather expensive but nice Parallax 433 MHz RF Transceiver from Solarbotics.

The Parallax unit adds an analogue output that’s proportional to the instantaneous signal strength. I hooked up the output to the trusty sdfatlib analogue logger, set the logger to sample every 50ms (figuring that, every now and again, it’s going to see part of a transmission) and this is what I saw:

Pretty noisy, I know. But look, there are regular peaks:

Here I’ve highlighted all the peaks with signal strength ≥ 200 (in arbitrary units, where 1024 would be full scale). It’s pretty regular; the largest peaks come in a shade under every 32 seconds, or a multiple thereof. If you need additional decimal places to validate your worldview, I’m thinking the period’s around 31.86s.

Observations made during last night’s frobbing and cackling episode seem to confirm that the display updates about every 32s. If you adjust the load mid-cycle, nothing changes until the update. If the display misses an update, it’ll refresh in 64 or 96 seconds.

I don’t yet know what bitrate the data comes through at, or the protocol. I’ve logged some data recorded at various rates: 433mhz_powercost_data. The file names give a hint at the data rate; L1200V04 was recorded at 1200bps, for example. I’m guessing that there’s some kind of sync header, then the total value and the current temperature (which was around/below freezing at the time). I need to work on that.

Update: I rewrote the logger to use the Arduino’s internal UART, since — lovely though NewSoftSerial may be — it causes millis() to report wildly inaccurate times at low bit rates. I recorded a bunch more data (powercost-arduino2.zip) in a slightly more useful text format. It has three columns:

  • the time, in milliseconds, at which the record was recorded
  • the time difference between this and the previous record, in milliseconds. Maybe not as useful as it could be. If adjacent records are about 31860ms apart, they’re transmissions from the meter.
  • 120 bytes of data recorded at the current bit rate (given in the file name) encoded in hex.

I’ve also included the Arduino sketch, which could be better documented.

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