WaterMote and Zenner water meter

[TomWS]

I tried hall sensors before I went the optical sensor route. The gauss reading from my meter was too weak. But every meter is different.

The meter has to be designed for external pickup to use mag pickups.  These meters have a reasonable magnetic field - they have to have for the external pickup to work.  In this case, however, OP is trying to piggy back on an external pickup.  I think you can resolve the information, but you may need to tweak it to get a reliable reading.

Tom

[Felix]

I dont think mine might be designed for pickup although it has an external reader, I havent spent a lot of time to figure out how that works but its a standard reader that I see on many houses.
The dial has it built in somehow, a wire comes out and goes to the outside unit which is wirelessly read.

Unfortunately these utility meters (electric, gas, water) are not always very user friendly. I havent played with the gas/electric meters and I think it's "illegal" to tamper in any way or attach anything to them (electric seems to have a pulse IR signal). The gas one doesnt although they installed an attachment to make it wirelessly readable by the utility company.

I currently only read my water meter. When I have time for this, I might focus on reliable reading of electric and maybe gas if I figure out how to read those meters.

[LukaQ]

Electric meter reading is easy, reading current power that is. Keeping track of kwh is harder. I do ave woking prototype, that reads current power level (via led), counts kwh and accumulates for low and high rate, takes into account time, when it switches over and also weekends, just not public holidays and such

[TomWS]

I dont think mine might be designed for pickup although it has an external reader, I havent spent a lot of time to figure out how that works but its a standard reader that I see on many houses.
The dial has it built in somehow, a wire comes out and goes to the outside unit which is wirelessly read.

Yeah, my house water meter, which I installed, is that type.  It's built for monitoring, but only because it has the switch internal and generates one pulse per gallon (IIRC).   

I do have a propane tank monitor that works on the orientation of the level gauge via mag pickup, but that's also different.  The mag pickup is a two axis pickup so that the mag field is converted to an angle and, therefore, the orientation of the gauge.

Tom

[Lukapple]

Hi,
I finally found some time to do a quick test of those sensors.
I've tried both sensors:
- SY310: no luck, it doesn't detect that spinning "wheel",
- hall sensor DRV5053VAQLPG: I've connected it directly to arduino VIN, GND and A7 pins, and analog value was jumping around 300 and raised to about 700 when sensor got closer to a small magnet. But I didn't detect any higher deviation when I attached sensor to water meter 

Here is a code that I've used for test readings:

Code Select Expand

int outputpin= 7; //analog - Hall DRV5053VAQLPG
//int outputpin= 14; //digital - SY310

void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
int rawvalue= analogRead(outputpin);
//int rawvalue= digitalRead(outputpin);
Serial.println(rawvalue);
delay(5);
}

[TomWS]

- hall sensor DRV5053VAQLPG: I've connected it directly to arduino VIN, GND and A7 pins, and analog value was jumping around 300 and raised to about 700 when sensor got closer to a small magnet. But I didn't detect any higher deviation when I attached sensor to water meter 

310 should be the reading with no magnetic field (assuming 3.3V processor power supply) so it must be they have the magnetic field captured pretty well.  Too bad for that.

Tom

[Felix]

The EE310 can easily be tested with a blank sheet of paper and one side blackened with black marker, as you transition from black to white the sensor will go LOW/HI. That will help you determine the distance at which the sensor works best.