I’m looking for an ai on the edge alternative. The software has many bugs and is not really actively maintained. Therefore, I’m looking for an alternative. I was thinking about something like using my old USB webcam, connect it to a Raspberry Pi (better Wi-Fi connection) and having a container on my Home Assistant to read the numbers and gauge and push it into HA.
Has anyone some recommendations? Especially regarding the container which should reads the values from the livestream or images?
Hey WOlly, I am thinking about doing the exact same thing.
There are quite a few esp32 camera’s available at virtually no cost.
Do you expect to have light around the meter at all times, since mine is in a basement and I assume I either have to get an IR camera or ensure a LED-light will illuminate.
I Totally missed the ai_task. I could think of a workflow with esp home (streaming the meter image) and then using ai_task to get the numbers. If not, I’ll try the Raspberry Pi to stream the image.
It may depend on what kind of water meter, i.e. what type of gauges, dials, numbers etc. it has.
Here is one reference I came across recently
However I have tried both gpt and a few google generative ai models to read a gas meter with analog dial gauges (the ones that have a circle with number 0 to 9, and a needle pointing towards one of the numbers), and amazingly it understands how the dials on a gas meter work (it knows one dial is in 1,000,000 cu-ft, the previous one is 100,000, cu-ft and the previous dial can be used to better guess where the current dial is pointing,) but it could never read the dials correctly. It might get close on one of the dials, but it was always way off on the others…
The project seems alive to me (last release in March and last commit 2 weeks ago.
Not sure what’s your issues, but works pretty much flawlessly for my my electricity and water meters.
I tried with Google Vision as well, but was definitely more cumbersome and less reliable, besides being cloud based and paid.