Watermeter plugin for Juham™

Description

A web camera and AI-based water meter solution for Juham™ home automation.

This package includes two different water meter implementations:

• A simple class that compares subsequent images to measure differences. The greater the difference between images, the more the arrows and digits on the water meter have changed, indicating water consumption. This solution also uploads the images to a specified FTP site when water consumption is detected, allowing homeowners to inspect the water meter visually. While this solution doesn’t provide exact water consumption readings, it is highly reliable for detecting leaks. Just ensure that spiders or other potentially moving objects don't obstruct the camera's view of the water meter.

• Tesseract OCR and OpenCV solution for reading and interpreting water meter digits. This class requires further work to be truly useful. My Raspberry Pi didn't have enough disk space, so I decided to set this aside for now.

.. image:: _static/images/watermeter_diff.png :alt: Web camera based water meter leak detector based on comparison of subsequent images :width: 640px :align: center

Getting Started

To install:

.. code-block:: bash

  pip install juham-watermeter

Which installs everything needed for reading water meters with the simple image comparison based solution.

If you want to play with the Tesseract OCR and OpenCV solution for reading and interpreting water meter digits, please read on.

Installing Tesseract OCR to read the digits:

.. code-block:: bash

  sudo apt install tesseract-ocr

If you are on Windows, visit the Tesseract GitHub repository, or Download a precompiled Windows binary from UB Mannheim.

2. Install

   .. code-block:: bash

   pip install juham-watermeter

3. Configure

To adjust update interval and other attributes edit WaterMeter.json configuration file.

Note about OpenCV and contributors

The Python coverage failed with the No source for code: 'juham_watermeter\config-3.py' error, when all the other Python projects with precisely identical structures worked fine. Traced down the bug to opencv package, and added a .coveragerc file with the following content:

.. code-block:: bash

[run]
omit = 
  config.py
  config-3.py

as a solution. This will of course blow up sooner or later, when some OpenCV developer decides to rename those files.