The latest article from @Blastoise186 is live - documenting their experience of the new Chameleon ivie Bud!

@Rick H you may enjoy having a look at this ^^^

It is a shame the device doesn't yet have real time integration with an ivie app or Smartthings or an api.

Consumers are still left with few mainstream options for getting real time smart meter energy usage info onto anything but an IHD. The Glow IHD is an option for example. 

I am not sure how many customers would actually make use of real time info, but i expect it will increase in the future. 

It feels to me like it would have been better for Chameleon to delay launching the device until they had more features ready.

They also mention an integration with uswitch in the future, which may be useful to assess what time of use tariff would be best based on customers real time usage. For the time being there are few tariffs available anyway. 

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Yeah, I’d agree with your thoughts there as well. It feels to me that the ivie Bud needs more polish and the closed beta could have been better utilised. A tester from it reached out to me recently actually and told me a lot. They were under NDA with Chameleon though, so I’ve agreed to their request for anonymity. Not even Tim and Jess know who that tester is. :)

But yeah, once those integrations come into play, I’d be more willing to try it again - except that I’ve got a second blocker in that my site is unique so I doubt I could ever use third party tools with Raichu.

I would review the Hildebrand Glow to make a fair comparison between the two. But two problems prevent me from doing so. Firstly, the permanent one of my unique site and secondly… Stock issues…

However, if you’d like to review it, I’m in no doubt that Tim will happily help you out with getting it published. :D

My ivie Bud arrived today. Said all I needed was a Smartphone and a recent energy bill.Tried to set it up and got as far as uploading a recent bill with all the info they wanted. It rejected this but after several failed attempts decided to try and get the ball rolling via my PC. It worked first time and obviously a six page bill is far easier to upload on a PC than a Smartphone.  It took two minutes to connect to my smart meters downstairs and although I thought I was going to have to input all my tariff information it was there already. Also, my weekly and monthly totals as well. I was quite gobsmacked. After one hour, I can’t praise this highly enough and hope my mind isn’t changed during the forthcoming hours, days and weeks.  Highly recommended .

Nice one!

The pairing process is ultra simple for 99.99% of people and I think I noted that in my review. It’s just the 0.01% who fall into my group where it doesn’t work so well.

I hope you enjoy it!

I have had my bud since 5th March, and it will not activate, it goes through the process of trying to join my smart meter then reboots back to the Wi-Fi connection screen, click continue and it is stuck at the activation screen again.

Hey @morristonm41 ,

That’s not good. You’ll want to chat with tech support about this. Please email customercare@ivie.co.uk and they’ll get back to you with the next steps. If the ivie Bud needs to be unpaired from the Comms Hub, OVO can do that for you.

I have emailed customer care a few times, last response was on 8th March saying they have escalated it to technical team, but no reply since, I am not an OVO customer.

I have the same problem re activation and it is very frustrating.  Mine starts the process and then reverts back to the WiFi and activation screen.  I’ve emailed customer care and they asked me for my GUID and MPAN details but have not heard anything since.  Before I purchased it I did a compatibility check which said my smart S1 meter was compatible (Secure Liberty 100) but wondering if that is the problem.  Keen to get it sorted, especially with the increased energy tariffs that start next month.    

Chameleon did mention they’ve been swamped with emails recently. That might be why.

Hang in there for now, they should respond within a few days from now.

Hi @Blastoise186 !

Thanks for your review. It helped me to activate the Ivie bud I received this week.

I could not activate it on https://ivie.co.uk/activate. The House number+postcode fails for me (3 flats/meters in the house maybe), and they won’t support the MPAN method. Going through Smarthing android app, creating the chameleon account with the MPAN, and associating the Ivie bud made the association possible.

Chameleon support is very disappointing. I wrote a detailed feedback earlier. They first asked for my MPAN, but did nothing with it. In the next email, they put the blame on "national infrastructure maintenance", which I guess means DCC. I think they won't have worked further than that, until someone realize they need to add lookup by MPAN on https://ivie.co.uk/activate.

The Ivie bud does not have a battery, compared to the HMI3 I had also.

I thought that the Ivie bud would allow me to access realtime data via API or smartthings. Smartthings doesn't show anything yet - 0 for electricity, no gas meter. I've pocked the CAD with nmap, and no TCP/UDP port seems open, so I guess no MQTT/GraphQL/whatever methods I've been reading on Chameleon Wifi IHD would work. I'm not a fan of cloud things for my home anyway, and I was a little upset about having to use smartthings.

As I'm not sure this product even has been tested, I've lost all trust in Chameleon team, and I don't want to have them upload my data on their cloud without me being able to access it, so I'll just return it. Total waste of time, money and grey energy in my opinion (already had a IHM3).

I guess I'll just put a current clamp to get my realtime measurements, and forget about this UK smart meter non-sense. Or wait that Hildebrand manages to get their product and supply working hopefully one day.

Does anyone knows if it's possible to have an opensource USB key that would just connect to the smartmeter with zigbee? I guess the pairing/verification process with DCC makes it impossible anyway? I don't understand why people cannot have a account on DCC directly with their MPAN, which would allow to add/remove authorization give to third-party providere, and which would allow to pair this kind of device. Or maybe I've been missing something?
 

Hi @FredG ,

I feel your pain there. For me, the biggest annoyance is the lack of an internal battery, especially since the ivie Bud is based on the Chameleon IHD7 and all previous models like the IHD1, IHD2, IHD3 and IHD6 have always featured one. I could actually see a void in the case where would have been a battery - even the built-in display backlight makes that pretty obvious. To opt-out of the services you’ll want to contact the support team and put a request in to opt-out of the Chameleon Cloud platform and request to return the device. They can be a little slow to reply, but they do respond eventually. It’s most likely just because they’re getting swamped and to be fair, Chameleon has historically never really done any customer support.

If you’re returning the device, please do a Full Reset before you box it back up. The option to do so can be found in the settings menu.

I’ve already spoken to them about some of your other points and I’m waiting for a reply on them - the lack of MPAN setup is a huge pain if you ask me and I’ve suggested they fix that.

Samsung SmartThings support with the ivie Bud is a future feature and they do disclose this fact on the website. Either way, all IHD CAD functionality relies on some kind of cloud services to process the data. There is no way of getting around that which I’m aware of and given that I work in cybersecurity myself… I’m unlikely to recommend any because 99.999% of the visitors to this forum are nowhere near as tech savvy as I am. I’m afraid I can’t risk having users break their stuff and complaining about not being able to fix it because they don't know what they just did.

As for the cloud stuff, I’m afraid it’s mandatory to use their cloud platform in order to set it up and this is for a good reason - it’s the only way that Chameleon are able to pair the ivie Bud to your meter without involving your supplier and it’s the same for the Hildebrand Glow. The DCC Other User role requires authentication and verification to be done first and it’s impossible to do that over the phone for example. The only workaround is to use an IHD that comes from your energy supplier as these can be paired without internet access.

As for rolling your own? Sorry, but that’s completely impossible. DCC and the NCSC won’t allow it for security reasons because Smart Meters are considered part of critical national infrastructure so you’d get stuck in 50 years of red tape. I can see the concept you’re thinking of, but sadly I don’t see it ever becoming a reality because chances are very few people would actually use it.

Hi again @Blastoise186 !

Thanks for the quick reply.

I’ve just tried the full-reset. I have the same result as you, “This Ivie Bud has already been activated” on https://ivie.co.uk/activate, and the device is stuck in the Activation screen. I have Software version 1.2 on the Ivie bud, but that’s likely a bug from the server-side. Maybe they want Ivie bud to be sold second-hand, but they should allow a re-activation with the same MPAN at least.

I don’t think there is a way to fix that until they finish their development. But now I can return the device under the full warranty condition, instead of “unhappy return”. Hardly unbelievable they would get this kind of bug around.

I also work in security actually. Not wanting Chameleon cloud in my house is a requirement now :D

While the cloud is mandatory to activate/pair the device with the smart meter (it could probably be done by Bluetooth and mobile, wifi is not necessary), having the real-time measurement uploaded on a cloud is not mandatory technically, they could just expose an API on the device. But I agree that for marketing, it’s better to have a production already packaged to sell to more people. Maybe there is not so much market for this kind of product actually, and the 30-mins data usage available with DCC Other is enough. I have Bright app and Hugo, and that’s probably enough.

For me, it should be a part of the mission to have DCC expose a space where you can check the grants you have given on your meters as part of the DCC Other User scheme. I don’t see where else it could be accessed. I’ve granted Bright app, Hugo, Chameleon so far, but I could easily have forgotten one already. Also I have no idea if they reset that properly when you’re moving/changing supplier/...

I just wonder why why we cannot have a kind of serial port from the meters/communication device, just like all European countries do for decades now.

I just wonder why why we cannot have a kind of serial port from the meters/communication device, just like all European countries do for decades now.

Well, probably because the NCSC is a thing in the UK and not elsewhere so the other countries that allow this don’t have the expertise that the UK has. It was their decision to ban such capability in Smart Meters. The ability to connect your smartphone directly to an S2 meter via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth was explored though, but ultimately rejected because it wasn’t possible to do it securely and reliably. In fairness, not everyone has a suitable smartphone either. After all, you cannot hack a device via a mechanism that doesn’t exist on it.

To be honest, there’s also the safety element. The last thing you want to do with an electric meter that’s got 240v running through it, is expose a metal port to the end user. I’ve already heard too many horror stories about countries that equip electric meters with serial ports that caused electric shocks - and it quickly becomes obvious why optical ports are used instead for meters destined for the UK, especially in cases where the meter lives outside and weather is a factor. In the UK, the optical port is also disabled for security reasons as well while the meter is in the field. It gets fitted anyway for factory testing and repair purposes and is enabled only in those environments. Any attempt to use the optical port in the field might will likely trigger a tamper alarm with the supplier and these do get investigated.

With that being said, the regular Chameleon IHDs that are NOT the ivie Bud do not require Chameleon Cloud stuff and in fact, don’t even talk to it at all in a default configuration outside of getting firmware updates every so often, if the supplier is subscribed to firmware update services. I’ve got two Chameleon IHD6-CAD-PPMIDs that I call the Kecleon Brothers and both have Wi-Fi access. Because the CAD features aren’t active, they never really talk to anyone and I’ve verified this using tcpdump in my UniFi Dream Machine, Exploud. In actual fact, the Kecleon Brothers chat with Exploud a lot when they’re active, but almost all of that activity is just basic network stuff, DNS, DHCP and the other basic protocols to maintain a connection at all.

It’s actually impossible to get real-time usage data with just DCC Other User and you also can’t realistically pull Half-Hourly data for the current day either via DCC - only historical data is available. In order to grab live data, a CAD (Consumer Access Device) enabled IHD is required. On top of that, the only way to communicate with a Smart Meter in the UK is by the use of SMETS Commands and these all go via DCC for SMETS2 (and SMETS1 meters will all do the same too, once that migration is completed). No IHD has Bluetooth support that I know of and nor does any Comms Hub.

For me personally, it makes sense to prevent the ivie Bud being re-sold on eBay and Amazon. Chameleon probably has to follow some kind of rule about what they’re allowed to do with these devices and the ToS and FAQ both warn you that the device can only be used at the installation address it was sent to. I already see way too many nightmares that are caused by that activity and I strongly discourage buying IHDs from those places because you don’t know the history of the device. However, I’ve suggested the ability to at least re-arm the same device on the same site in the event you accidentally nuke it with a Full Reset. I would hope that becomes possible at some point.

The NCSC also enforces a rule as part of the specifications that there cannot be any way to hook up anything to a Smart Meter locally outside of the ZigBee HAN. Even the Comms Hub uses a “wired” connection to the electric meter for power only, data is still sent between them over the HAN.

As for access via DCC Other User, it’s retained during a Change of Supplier flow, but the SMETS Command Restrict Access for Change of Tenancy boots out ALL DCC Other Users when a Change of Tenancy flow is triggered, such as when you’re moving home and close your account. This process nukes all encryption keys and security keys for everyone with DCC Other User that had them on your meters and fully disconnects them. DCC also makes sure that it’s taken care of as well. There’s currently no other way to check the status of your grants that I know of. Would be a useful feature though.

Ultimately, if the ivie Bud actually worked for me, I’d have probably been willing to lend Chameleon a hand with bug blasting as that’s something I’m pretty skilled at. If you remember the “spinning circle of death bug” in the OVO Energy app from last year, that was partially my fault but it’s been fixed since then - simple case of me not reading CodePush documentation properly before suggesting a fix to another bug that I managed to help OVO fix! Alas, I couldn’t even get it to work because of my unique circumstances and I’ve never managed to get any DCC Other User to access Raichu’s data. It seems only OVO, DCC and Western Power Distribution are able to do that… XD

The kind of serial port that other countries have is a really dumb read-only port, that send basically the same info that the meter screen would display, but every or twice a second. They are of course isolated and low voltage ( I have of course not checked all of them). The French older SAGEM model S10C3 is galvanic isolated for instance(“teleinfo”, tells you kWh, instant power, economy rate, ...). In very rare cases, galvanic isolation could fails, but it feels to me the horror stories you heard about that port are quite fantasy, but I’d be happy to read more of them if you can source them.

So I really have trouble to see what kind of security risk such a port would have. I’d agree that the electricity company in other countries were not supervised by a national security agency. But the cyber-security argument to not have such a read-only port available is very weak to me. Europeans on the other end probably care more about privacy than UK. In the end, having the possibility to share your data with many third-party companies, and not being able to have a tight control over it, is far worse than anything. Is your data secure in every company? Who knows can access your data, and how check when you’re going to holiday to send some friends to organize a proper burglary?

If you think about the security that the supplier company want toward the consumers, then it makes sense. But I’m not convinced that many would hack their meter, but not a reason to be lazy on security. And as the consumer I’m more interested in my own security than one of the supplier, and it seems NCSC couldn't care less about that...

The other “DCC/SMETS” port seems more complicated than a simple read-only port, so I’m not sure we’re talking the same kind of port. If a port would allow you to change things on your contract, many do things like fancy real-time bidding at some point, so yes, it need to strong security. But then again, I’d say that people willing to play with that would probably use internet in the end, so a direct connection to DCC via internet, or with a smart supplier, is at least secure, than having to go through your smart meter to change these settings. I actually have no idea yet why this is so complicated, you call that British quality on security, but I just call that over-engineering, which I don't really like. Maybe Ii just don't see the whole picture.

I've been designing and selling electronic devices. I just talked about bluetooth and mobile app, because bluetooth is still much cheaper than wifi, so it could be use for device activation. But anyway, it's much easier to just use your supplier already configured IHD, than useless Wifi/Cloud IHD which won’t allow to act as a CAD.

I really have trouble to see why these devices should be locked to one address, and cannot go on second-hand market. These are supposibly help us make the planet greener, and we just managed to get another electronic device home. Everyone are likely to have a new one each time they change supplier or relocate.

Actually, it’s much safer to run Smart Meters using a private network infrastructure that never touches the public internet.

I don’t want to drag this thread too far off track though, but the topic is well discussed in various threads on the forum. If you search for some relevant search terms on the built-in search system, you should uncover them pretty quickly.

I can also say this much. The intention is that all IHDs remain behind when you move home, so there should already be one when you move in with an existing Smart Meter in place. The second hand market only exists at all primarily because people run off with them and try to sell them later on, whether or not they realise that the IHD should have been left with the original meters…

For the most part, the IHD will continue to work across suppliers as well. There’s a few edge cases, but I’ve got a whole book of diagnostic tricks I can pull off if needed - and OVO’s Support Team has even more at their disposal.

Oh dear! Earlier I wrote “ After one hour, I can’t praise this highly enough and hope my mind isn’t changed during the forthcoming hours, days and weeks.  Highly recommended . “

Unfortunately, I now have to revise that.  After a few days I realised that the displayed cost of the Electricity daily was more or less correct but the Gas was obviously way too low. It took me a while to realise it but the tariffs are based on kWh for both utilities which is fine for Electricity as the meter counts in kWh but the Gas counts in cubic meters which is converted to kWh when you get billed. The effect of this is that when the Bud displays energy used for gas it is seriously underestimated. This means that if I use £11 worth of gas the display says I have used £1.  This makes the Bud next to useless.  An email to Ivie got the reply that the Bud doesn’t do calculations so contact your supplier.

If I could change my gas meter (EDMI GS-60B) to change to a kWh display instead of cubic meters it might solve the problem. Anyone know if this is possible?

I’m afraid not. Converting cubic metres to kilowatt hours for gas metering purposes is complicated and varies based on a lot of factors. Doing it reliably is impossible for an IHD like the ivie Bud and would drain too much battery on a gas meter.

Thanks for that. All my recent gas meters have been cubic meters so how on earth does any IHD cope with that? When they say you can keep an eye on your expenditure with one, is this total garbage?

@Blastoise186 

I was wondering about a serial port precisely to avoid having the meter connected on the internet via IHD, or to have my real-time data consumption data updated on the cloud. I guess we agree that keeping off the internet is a good idea. I don’t think any electricity infrastructure for meters in the world are running on Internet directly, that would be very insecure indeed. I was just wondering in case of very advanced use case real-time, where you'd need to check or guess the price of electricity in advance to charge an EV for instance, which might depend on the wind in UK, then I'll probably have a part of my system connected on the internet anyway.

Thanks for clarifying that the IHD should be kept in the house when you move. I’d be really tempted to take it with me anyway, as it'd show the whole consumption history until that "Restrict Access for Change of Tenancy" that people won't see when they move probably. But there would be no way I leave a £45 Ivie Bud I paid with my own money to the next tenant, I would keep it and moved along to my next MPAN. Or thrown to the bin if this cannot be used again.

@Chris J  I just reviewed what I had on mine. Indeed, it only showed the standing fees for the gas, electricity works as expected. It took like 5 days for the Bright app to get info on the gas, maybe it’d be the same for you? And indeed, I think gas meters can only measure volumes, so the energy and price need to be given by the supplier somehow. But I find it strange it wouldn’t be provided. I would strongly suggest you to try the Bright app, there is a homeassistant integration and quite openAPI to get all your smart-meter  historical data in volume and price in 30mins timeslot.

@FredG Thanks for the advice. I loaded the Bright app and all the info was gathered (Including Gas) within 5 minutes.

@Blastoise186 Thanks for all your advice as well, very instructive.

My IVIE Bud displays gas usage in £££ correctly...

Thanks chartman

Maybe brief but extremely helpful!

That’s me…. also IVIE Bud stil suffers connection problems/dropuot the same as my Chameleon 3. Be it software, interference, poor link budget I’ll never get to know. They both have to sit in the garage ( 2M from the HUB) until they finally rejoin properly and show data. Then I move them back into the lounge where it’s actually useful to have them…. In the garage it’s pointless. How long they last before they drop out again is anyones guess as is how long they take to rejoin properly….

I don’t have that trouble (yet) My Bud is situated next to my broadband hub and about 3-4 metres from the meters situated in the garage below and with a concrete floor/ceiling in between! I’m not sure it’s vital to have them near the meters as the connection is wi-fi.