Smart Watermeter reader aka AI-on-the-edge-device (by jomjol)

2021-01-12 #Blog | #AI | #Watermeter

Every once a year our local village water department sends us a snail mail to read the measure of our water counter and send them back. And every year, I think, why the hell is this necessary, if there are technical solutions out there which can handle this, …but that’s another story, however.

Next time, we can do this a little bit easier directly in our Home Assistant.

Thanks to the great effort of @jomjol there is an open source solution in order to read out our digital and even anolog meters (even reading out old energy meters should be possible)!

What hardware do you need?

• ESP32 AI Thinker CAM

Platform

You need one running MQTT broker. You can find a guide here.

Architecture overview

Before we come to the implementation of the client and the gateway, let’s check what we would like to build.

How does it work?

The ESP32 cam in the 3d printed housing is mounted on top of the watermeter.The device is using a trained neural network in order to interpret the numbers. After setup and calibration of the firmware the cam will push the data through the MQTT channel in a defined interval. All you need in order to setup and configure can be found here.

How does it look like?