Strange signs comming in

General
1

Hi,

I am trying to make a flow for reading data from an energy meter to a Grafana dashboard via Influxdb. I have a MBUS-USB converter, obviously connected to the USB port, transfering the signal from the HAN port. My problem is that I am getting in tons of signs that is unreadable, such as:

le a�e a� a� a�$�! 3a�<�! Ga� �! a� �# 4a� �# Ha� �#,B~~�

I also get the following sentece: AIDON_V0001 `�
This is the name of the energy meter which makes me belive that the hardware is working as it should.

If I change the Input to Binary Buffers (instead of Ascii-strings) in the Serial In-node I get values like this:

[ 11, 65, 73, 68, 79, 78, 95, 86, 48, 48 … ]

I don't belive this is Hexadecimals, it's something else..

I would like the message to look something like this:

{"Date_Time":"2020-01-06 20:47:13",
"Act_Pow_P_Q1_Q4":6673
"Curr_L1":7510
"Volt_L1":2314
.......}

So, is there perhaps someone who has any idea how to solve this problem...? Maybe some code in a function-node...?

Best Regards
Joakim

2

Looks like the serial speed is wrong.

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3

+1 for trying different serial port baud rates. I see the same thing all the time when I have the wrong baud rate set and I try to use the serial monitor in Arduino IDE.

4

Out of interest I Googled and saw there is an existing Node Red add-on node-red-contrib-ams-decoder that might be worth trying rather than reinventing the wheel. The page says it works with Aidon meters, although I have no knowledge of it.

5

That array is the decimal equivalent of AIDON... which suggests the baud rate is correct. Can you post a bit more of the array please so we can see exactly what comes next?

6

Success!!

Thanks alot for your help! I now receive the data in correct syntax thanks to the Node AMS Decoder Aidion. I was not aware of the existance of such "down to detail" nodes.

Great forum and participants!

Again, Thanks!

All the best,
Joakim

1 Like