PHOTO ENCODING OF ANALOG WATER METER FOR USER ACCESS AND PAYMENT SYSTEM

摘要

This paper presents design reconfiguration of analog water meter to provide remote access to user water consumption and billing records, payments, and meter device monitoring using photo-encoding as the detecting method for water consumption, a PIC18F2423 microcontroller for data processing, and SMS (short message service) technology for data transportation. To validate the system design, an analog water meter was converted into a digital equivalent and interfaced to the cellular network to transmit parameters of the meter to-and-from a consolidation server (CS). The prototype was tested for operations such as user consumption and billing records, payments, device control, and tamper notification. Test results conducted within a 12km radius gave an average response time of 16 seconds spanning from time of SMS request to the CS to read data from meter through data processing and submission to user. To manage system congestion from multi-users, a multi-threaded algorithm was implemented with each SMS request handling a single thread.