The Energy Stick

[MindBender]

I just got my electricity connection upgraded, from 1x 25A to 1x40A because I'm in the market for a PV installation and because we are switching to electric cooking. A 3x 25A connection would have been better, but that requires my floor to be cracked open and even though I hate these tiles, I don't hate them that much. And at least 1 phase keeps my X10 setup simple.

My energy grip company, Enexis, offered this upgrade service at no costs, so I took the deal. As an extra a smart electricity meter was installed; A Kamstrup 162JxC. And a smart gas meter was attached to it. When inquiring about the process, I told the knowledgeable guy of Eneco that I wanted to monitor my consumption and that I needed access to a P1 port for that. He told me I was free to use the P1 port for my own use, which was something I didn't expect. In most cases people tell you not to touch it, mostly because they don't have any knowledge about it. But on top of this, the guys offered me to include a 'USB stick' that already does the monitoring for me. I doubted if it was what I needed, but it was free, so I agreed.

Today it came with the meter, and the system is called "The Energy Stick", TES for short. It's basically a little box, connected to the P1 port of the meter, and a USB stick with a display. The two communicate wirelessly over 2.4GHz. When plugging the stick into a computer, it presents itself as a 167kB USB mass-storage device with a single FAT12 (!) formatted partition on it. The filesystem contains a number of comma separated files:
-r-xr-xr-x 1 robert robert 156 1999-12-31 23:00 Elektra dag.csv
-r-xr-xr-x 1 robert robert 135 1999-12-31 23:00 Elektra kwartier.csv
-r-xr-xr-x 1 robert robert 36 1999-12-31 23:00 Gas dag.csv
-r-xr-xr-x 1 robert robert 48 1999-12-31 23:00 Gas uur.csv
-r-xr-xr-x 1 robert robert 62 1999-12-31 23:00 Mijn verbruik.url

Does anybody have any experience with this system? Are there other ways to connect to the box, without using the USB stick? Are there any extensions for it, like an attractive desktop display with pretty graphs on it?

[MindBender]

The manual says not to open it, and that's all I needed:

Insides of The Energy Stick

TES Stick inside.jpg (95.01 KiB) Viewed 3102 times

The TES stick is powered by a Microchip PIC18F26J50, which uses a 128kiB 25LC128 SPI memory chip for non-volatile storage and a GreenPeak GP500C for ZigBee communication.

The non-populated 5-pin header seems like a PIC programming connector; Pin 1 is connected to MCLR of the PIC, pin 2 carries the PIC's operating voltage and pin 3 is connected to ground. Let's see if I can get in with my RealICE.

When it communicates, it seems to use 2 base frequencies: 2450MHz and 2475MHz. I'm sure I can demodulate the bit streams with my signal analyzer, but I expect that to be pointless, due to encryption.