metering the smart meter, part: the third

Well... so far it doesn’t work ;) The IR receiver that I thought worked so well, and does SOMETIMES drops pulses other times and sends multiple pulses still other times completely messing up the reading.  I tried some filtering of it to sane levels in the arduino it’s connected to but that just wasn’t leading to anything helpful.

And after I went to all that trouble to make a nice sensor out of it too.

The next experiment was just a phototransistor which initially appeared not to work at all, but changing it from a digital pin to an analog pin seems to have solved the problem. I can definitely pick up the pulse sampling analog in a loop and it’s quite a long pulse too it seems. 

So it’s back to the drawing board to build a new sensor out of the phototransistor and then some significant software updates once that is working. 

I will post again when I’ve got it working better!