I’ve recently dipped my big toe into ESPHome and have my electric monitoring added to HA. I took care of water using a Flo device. That leaves gas.
Washington DC Gas just installed a new Honeywell AC-250 with an Elster b696-w rotary meter. I’m unclear whether this meter has a P1, can be read with AI on the edge or by reading an OTA signal.
I’m not shy with software development, but novice with electronic and 3d printing (housing). Can anyone get me started with this project?
Far from an expert, but I THINK the P1 ports are more of a European thing (I certainly don’t have one on any of my meters here in the US).
I’ve never used AI on the edge, but from what I gather it works pretty well as long as you have clearly visible numbers. I also did not have this on my gas meter (the cover was QUITE yellowed/distorted since it’s read electronically and no one actually looks at it.
A lot of folks also have a magnet on the number part that can be picked up with a hall effect sensor as it rotates. I tried this method but my meter didn’t seem to have any magnets (from what I could tell the little bit I was comfortable taking it apart, it looked like there was a mechanical linkage that picked up usage info for electronic reading).
In my case I stumbled upon folks using a magnetometer (qmc5883l in my case) to sense the movement of the diaphragm (which your meter is/has). Set it up and it’s worked amazingly well ever since.
Edit: forgot to mention sniffing OTA signals from the meter. Also tried this but (presumably) all of my meters encrypt the signal as I wasn’t able to pick anything useable up. I assume this is common practice now and only folks that had meters installed as remote reading was just becoming a thing have unencrypted data being thrown around.