Echelon/NES Smart Meters – dabbler.dk rebooted

We have been quiet for a while. Not because we have not been tinkering, but because we’ve been very busy tinkering.

To be precise we’ve been tinkering with our Echelon type 83331-3IAAD Smart Meters (power meters) and how to read out the consumption in a nice way…

Echelon type 83331-3IAAD Smart Meters (power meter)

At the Danish gathering Sommerhack.dk 2021 we’ll be presenting a session (Friday @ 16:00 CET) about our process and the current state of this project. See you there?

It is yet to be determined how much details we can share because we are currently under NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) with the product owner NES (Networked Energy Services) about the details… But that will hopefully change soon.

Are you interested in communicating with your Echelon Smart Meter?

Stay tuned for more info. on how to do it… coming to dabbler.dk very soon now…

Arduino IDE v1.8.9, esp32 v1.0.2 and ulptool v2.3.0

Arduino logo

Are you messing with ultra low power esp32 code and have tried to setup the ulptool example from duff2013s GitHub in Arduino IDE v1.8.9 with Espressif Systems esp32 v1.0.2?

Maybe you got a lot of strange compile errors like these?

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "C:\Users\<your user name>\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages\esp32\tools\ulptool\src/esp32ulp_build_recipe.py", line 506, in 
 main(sys.argv[1:])
 File "C:\Users\
<your user name>\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages\esp32\tools\ulptool\src/esp32ulp_build_recipe.py", line 106, in main
 build_ulp(PATHS, ulp_files, board_options, True)
 File "C:\Users\
<your user name>\AppData\Local\Arduino15\packages\esp32\tools\ulptool\src/esp32ulp_build_recipe.py", line 136, in build_ulp
 proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd[1],stdout=subprocess.PIPE,stderr=subprocess.PIPE,shell=False)
 File "C:\Python27\lib\subprocess.py", line 394, in init
 errread, errwrite)
 File "C:\Python27\lib\subprocess.py", line 644, in _execute_child
 startupinfo)
 WindowsError: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified
 exit status 1
 Error compiling for board ESP32 Dev Module.

Note: This error is also reported here: https://github.com/duff2013/ulptool/issues/35

It is quite a simple fix: The error is probably caused by Espressif Systems moving around some files in esp32 v.1.0.2 – or actually renaming a catalog.

You just need to edit a single file in ulptool v2.3.0. Simply open your platform.local.txt file and change the line:

compiler.ulp.path={runtime.tools.ulptool.path}/esp32ulp-elf-binutils/bin/

…to…

compiler.ulp.path={runtime.tools.ulptool.path}/bin/

…and you are “back in business” :-).