Current Cost Support Forum

Hi guys,

First off, i'm pleased to find the forum and see a development section here after spotting the Dev Boards for sale.

I have a question, however....

Will you be publishing (or making avalable) any schematic diagrams and/or Firmware (preferably asm) for the Dev boards or possibly other products to enable Firmware mods and the like?

At the moment i am using an EON badged EnviR to monitor my power useage but i've recently bought a second (second hand) unit with the intention of having two receivers.

Unfortunately the second unit i bought (cheap) appears to be either faulty or RF "deaf" as it appears to not get readings as frequently as my first RX. (Readings freeze and then loss of signal shortly after, despite being closer to TX) Any way, the long and short of it is, with the apparent fault and my long desire to peek inside my original, fully working unit, i had nothing to loose and i couldn't resist the temptation to finally take a look inside the faulty unit.

I was pleasantly surprised to find MCU's and RF modules that i am already somewhat familiar with. Fantastic!

With also discovering the Dev boards a few weeks back, i see lots of potential for all kinds of tom foolery, although i haven't considered exactly what yet, but i'm liking the potential. It all adds to the learning curve, right?

So with that story aside, i'm just curious to know if there are any plans to make additional technical info available in the future to aid with any expansion/mods/development etc?

Cheers.

Thanks for taking the interest here. It is unlikely that schematics/firmware will be made available online for hacking of C2 devices like dev boards. However, happy to help as much as I can. Anything in particualr that you wish to know?

Hi CC, thanks for the reply and sorry for my delayed response to this.

At the moment there isn't anything specific i wanted to know.

I suppose i am curious as to why the Dev boards were made available to the public when they only have a specific single function as they stand, with the firmware that's in them now. For instance the Digital board just sends a value of 0 or 500 Watts. So, other than using them to test the reception of display units i can't think why anyone would have much use for them if they couldn't mod them in some way to perform a different function.

Of course, the firmware could be re-written by individuals say, to fullfill a particular measurement/interface task, but in order to do that, one would have to reverse engineer them and/or analyse the protocol used over the C2 link, with there being no published info available. For example the pre-amble, sync word, data payload and any checksum data etc.

To be honest, i'm not at all surprised that this info won't be released, because i understand how much time and effort goes into designing hardware and writing code to bring it to life, and of course copywrite infringement and the like, but on the other hand here you have a forum section, related to further development and i'm kinda wondering how people would be supposed to develop "stuff" that would be compatible with the C2 system without any further info.

I'm really not trying to be awkward, i promise. But as a professional EE, and hobbyist, who already writes code everyday for products that use similar hardware, shall we say. I was just curious as to what the intended purpose of the Dev boards is, from the perspective of why they were made available but with no info to make it easier for potential developers to modify them.

I get the impression, maybe wrongly, that their purpose is/was intended for people to use them for development and "hacking" to interface them to various electrical systems or products, but i can't see any way that can be done without modification of atleast the firmware and technically speaking the original source code isn't or won't be made avaliable to help with that.

On the same note, the title to this very forum section as seen from the main forum index page is.... "The place for developers to discuss coding and hardware hacking" It seems like somewhat of a contradiction in terms when it specifically mentions coding and hardware hacking.

Please do understand, i'm am not trying to be offensive by what i say, nor do i mean any disrespect, i'm just trying to figure out the reasoning behind the above and am curious to know what sort of idea current cost has in mind for developers/coders/hackers etc in relation to the products available.

Personally, i'm not a PC software guy from a development perspective, but i do know embedded software and this type of hardware.

Anyway, thanks for hearing my rant. It's just curiosity, is all.

I'm planning on doing some work with the Dev boards given enough spare time in the near future but I will also find them usefull for other future projects i have on the horizon that are unreleted to energy monitoring.

And finally..... is it ok for me to send you a private message or two in the near future? In some of the things i've said here, i've tried to be less specific with it being "in public"

Thanks for hearing me out, if you got this far!