Utility meters are not just essential for billing purposes. They are playing an increasing role in resource planning, sustainability efforts, and public safety. BilliComm, a subsidiary of GoldCard (China's largest gas meter company), helps customers create high-performance, low-cost gas meters, water meters, and gas alarms through reliable, low-power, feature-rich communication solutions.
In recent years, the utility meter has undergone a major transformation. Basic meters that simply measure the flow of water or gas have gradually evolved into connected, multi-device applications with the meter at their heart. For instance, a gas meter and gas alarm can be connected via Bluetooth®. If the alarm detects a gas leakage, it informs the meter, which immediately cuts off the gas supply before sending a leakage event report to a cloud server and notifying the relevant safety authorities and fire department so that the leak can be quickly dealt with.
Another common scenario is when multiple users’ water meters are stored in one well. For automatic meter reading, the water utility needs to be able to communicate with each meter remotely. Adding wireless communication modules to each meter would be very expensive. A more cost-effective solution would be to install a central wireless communication module based on a Bluetooth concentrator in the well and add Bluetooth modules to the individual water meters. The concentrator automatically reads meters via Bluetooth and uploads data to a cloud server.
GoldCard Gas Alarm
GoldCard Gas Meter
GoldCard Water Meter
Finding the right solution
BilliComm supports companies developing metering and alarm applications for scenarios like these by offering Bluetooth communication modules as well as software and hardware solutions.
“In such scenarios, we recommend that customers use the Renesas DA14531 chip,” says Max Yao, DGM of BilliComm. “We compared it to chips from other suppliers and found that it has the lowest power consumption and more microcontroller resources. It is also easy to adapt to different application scenarios through software modifications.”
BilliComm uses the DA14531 as the Bluetooth heart of their own communication modules. “In addition to its low power consumption, the DA14531 is competitively priced. Also, GoldCard and Renesas have existing strategic partnerships which help with the supply chain, which is vital as we aim to be in the top three in the global communication module industry,” Yao adds.
Supporting success
The unique challenges of utility meter applications meant that implementing Bluetooth communication was not straightforward. “To speed up development, Renesas arranged for their field application engineers (FAEs) to hold many technical trainings in the early stages of the project and answered our questions on time,” explains product manager Harry Yang.
An example of this was when BilliComm needed to urgently provide customers with a prototype – before they had fully entered into the development project and so had no development resources available. “The Renesas FAEs help us develop a prototype code quickly, so we could fulfill our customers’ needs,” Yang adds.
“Later in the project, the Renesas FAEs actively organized research and development to discuss issues together. Then they checked and helped us optimize our code so that we could get the most out of the device. That kind of support helped us successfully complete development and delivery.”