A smart water meter not only measures water flow but uses wireless communication to connect to local or wide area networks allowing remote location monitoring and infrastructure maintenance – through leakage detection – and automatic billing and customer management including detection and countering tampering attempts. Smart meters are battery powered and thus low-power devices play a crucial role in defining system configurations.
ST supports designers with our unique system-level application know-how and a compelling portfolio of semiconductor products, evaluation boards and software development kits to overcome the design challenges posed by smart water meter applications.
Our ultra-low-power sub-GHz RF communication solutions support all major protocols: long-range – including WM-BUS and proprietary LPWAN protocols such as LoRa and Sigfox – and short-range such as dual NFC/RFID interface tags and ultra-low-power Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and 802.15.4 system-on-chips. Together with ultra-low-power STM8L or STM32L microcontrollers, our solutions help applications meet the battery lifetime expectancy needed in smart water meters.
