There was a great talk at Bsides about these devices. Guy hacked the hardware, about as hard as you can possibly imagine. Wait for the video. It actually might have some pretty big ramifications.
Smart meters are apparently zigbee based…
http://vrt-blog.snort.org/2010/06/smart-grids-and-importance-of-smart.html
The slides from the bsides talk are available.
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Fortis just replaced my old-school electricity meter with a C2S0D CENTRON.
It’s apparently equipped with a ZigBee radio so I’m excited to experiment with real-time consumption monitoring.
I plan to order an XBee radio and XBee Explorer,
flash it with the Digi Smart Energy firmware (network coordinator variation),
form a ZigBee network and somehow entice the meter to join (waves hands).
I’ll find the commands in the “metering device” “ZigBee Cluster Library” that the meter supports
and (at least initially) send commands from my laptop to the XBee with this XBee API implementation for Python.
There are also XBee API implementations for Arduino.
Does anyone have any advice before I start?
I understand I may require some cooperation from the utility (turn on the ZigBee radio, join my network)
but the BSides slides make me hope there’s more than one solution to some of that.
I understand from reading this thread that it might be way simpler to just buy one of the Rainforest products (but perhaps with fewer creative possibilities?)
There are some additional resources linked from the Digi Smart Energy page,
e.g. Creating a Smart Energy Device and the XBee Smart Energy product manual.
There’s a Digi Smart Energy forum.
Itron might help consumers realize “what’s in it for you?”
I have Rob Faludi’s book.
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