Description

Flow meters are becoming smarter and come with more and more communication options like low power RF or advanced options like prepayment. In addition, flow meter designs require ultra low power and in many cases in conjunction with a segment LCD driver. Typically for mid-end flow meter, the design can consist of one main HOST MCU carrying the metrology, application and communication software. The proposed design allows very quick implementation of a pre-payment function for flow meter application or any other ultra-low power application requiring segment LCD as well. The software enables a ready to be used solution to talk to a pre-payment interface: the SW communicates to the prepayment module and displays the unique corresponding ID onto the segment LCD display. The SW runs on the ultra-low power microntroller featuring a 160 segment LCD driver and can be ported to any other MSP430 microntroller of the family. Alternatively when prepayment is not required, communication on the board can be replaced with any TI sub 1GHz and/or 2.4GHz radios. The design is fully compatible with the TI RF plug-in evaluation modules and can support up to two radios talking to the MCU using SPI interface. This makes this design very suitable for water, gas meters, data collectors and applications which need segment based LCD and radio communication interfaces.