Using meter bus protocol to read electrical power meter

[Stan Collins]

I am using ABB Delta Plus power meters to measure electrical power consumed by fridges.  They use the M-Bus protocol.  I can communicate with the meter using proprietary software but I cannot get a response via my LabVIEW VI.  I have tried a SND_NKE command using Short Frame format and the parameters are transmitted but nothing comes back and the VISA Read times out.  I am sending the command as a string of Hex characters (10 40 00 40 16).  What am I doing wrong?

Stan Collins

[Wayne.C]

Stan,

Make sure that the String Control/Constant where you are entering the Hex string is set for 'Hex Display'.  Right click over the control or constant and select Hex Display.  If thats not it I suggest you post your vi.

[Stan Collins · Accepted solution]

Centrebolt

That's it!  Success.  I somehow knew it had to be something simple (plus me being too silly to see it!).  Many thanks..

Stan

[RDott]

Hi Stan,

I'm a not yet a NI user but I'm thinking about buying a compactFieldPoint System.
What I'm searching is a DataLogger that also could read an M-Bus. Since the local sales representative has no information about reading M-Bus, and you are the only one that reported on doing it, I would be grateful if you could report some experince to me.
Which components do you use additional to the logger?
How much efford is about needed to implement the interface in a VI?

Thanks, Ralf

[Rich_Silley_NIUK]

Good Morning Ralf

You will have to forgive me as I have no experience of using the M-Bus protocol but I suspect that as with most things, there will be a way of implementing this in LabVIEW. This really is not something that is widely done and therefore we do not have any documentation on this. Obviously if Stan can help that would be great but if you could give me some more info on both the protocol and the device you want to communicate to that would be great. I searched for m-bus on google and there seemed to be a couple of protocols so if you could clarify which one you are talking about that would be appreciated.

From Stan's comments about using the VISA functions do you implement this comms over a serial/ethernet connection?

If you could give me a little more detail then I will be happy to investigate this further for you.

Rich
NI | UK

[Stan Collins]

Sorry for not replying to this but I have not had cause to visit the forum for quite a while after my problem was diagnosed.  I may not be of much help to you because I have had to put this project "on hold" for a while.  We are using a mish-mash of third-party gizmos to acquire the various data for this project (temperatures as well as the electrical power).  We have an "MBUS10" RS232/MBUS converter from Techbase to convert to RS232 which we then read via a standard serial port.  There is also RS485 in there as well because of the transmission distance but that may not be relevant to you.  I wouldn't have thought Fieldpoint would be of any help to you unless you need it for something else.

I should close my original enquiry but if I see any more on this after i have resurrected the project I will let you know.

Stan Collins