water-meter-measurement-system

This is an overview of different project part to digitalize an analog water meter and use it for a house automatization system to controll the water consumption.

UPDATE: new Version for ESP32-CAM available on Thingiverse - much easear and cheaper due to integrated camera and illumination https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3860911

Overview

The system consists of a hardware fixture and and successiv software code to transform this finally to a measurement value for a database input.

To get an running system one needs 3 components:

Component Purpose Link
1. Mechanical Fixture Hardware components to fix a camera and illumination on a water meter Version for ESP32-CAM
Version for ESP8266 + ArduCAM
2. Taking pictures ESP8266 based html server to provide pictures from the camera https://github.com/jomjol/water-meter-picture-provider
3. Server for data processing and evaluation Image processing (Cutting, OCR, ...) to extract the needed features https://github.com/jomjol/water-meter-system-complete

The server is also as Docker-Container available for easy implementation:

Additional discussion with user experience

Extended user discussion can be found in the following forum: https://forum.iobroker.net/topic/23577/wasserzähler-selfmade

Details on image processing and signal chain within the server:

Component Usage Link
Alignment and decomposition Image processing with OpenCV library to extract the needed features https://github.com/jomjol/water-meter-image-cut
OCR for full digits Usage for OCR to extract the m³ part of the water meter https://github.com/jomjol/neural-network-digital-counter-readout
Analog to Digital Readout Usage of a Neural Network to digitalize analog pointers https://github.com/jomjol/neural-network-analog-needle-readout