1. Introduction
The present system of energy metering as well as billing in Bangladesh which uses electromechanical and
somewhere digital energy meter is error prone and it consumes more time and labor. The conventional
electromechanical meters are being replaced by new electronic meters to improve accuracy in meter reading. Still,
the Indian power sector faces a serious problem of revenue collection for the actual electric energy supplied owing
to energy thefts and network losses. One of the prime reasons is the traditional billing system which is inaccurate
many times, slow, costly, and lack in flexibility as well as reliability [1].
Meters, in the past and today in a few countries, were electromechanical devices with poor accuracy and
lack of configurability. Theft detection was also a challenge.Recent developments in this direction seem to provide
opportunities in implementing energy efficient metering technologies that are more precise, accurate, error free, etc.
[2].
A Prepaid Energy Meter enables power utilities to collect electricity bills from the consumers prior to its
consumption. The prepaid meter is not only limited to Automated Meter Reading but is also attributed with prepaid
recharging ability and information exchange with the utilities pertaining to customer’s consumption details. The use
of electronic token prepayment metering has been widely used in UK for customers with poor record of payment
[3]. A paper suggests a design of a system which can be used for data transmission between the personal computer
and smart card [4]. Another paper suggests making use of state of art technologies like WiMAX in Prepaid Energy
Meter owing to the idea of centralized accounting, monitoring and charging [5]. Polyphase prepaid energy metering
systems have also been proposed and developed based on local prepayment and a card reader [6]. Wireless prepaid
energy metering sytem has been proposed which incorporate RF based system [7]. Digital energy metering system
as an alternative for the clectromechanical system has been proposed and developed with the Peripheral Interface
Controller (PIC) and necessary software [8]. Due to the low cost of microcontrollers, Prepaid Energy Meter has
been developed using a microcontroller from the Microchip Technology Inc. PIC family [9].
In this paper, we have proposed a microcontroller based single phase digital Prepaid Energy Meter using
two microcontrollers from the Atmel AVR family because of its performance, power efficiency and design
flexibility and an Energy Meter IC. In this paper a credit card is used which is capable of communicating with both
the distributor unit from where the credit card have to be recharged and the energy meter to which the number of
recharged units to be laoded. An electronic circuit called USB burner circuit is used to load the recharged units both
in energy meter and smart card. Softwares have been developed in c- language and compiled by Win-AVR libc
compiler. The proposed enrgy meter has been implemented in the laboratory and finally results obtained have been
presented and compared with electromechanical energy meter.