I have got a real old ferraris electricity meter and a gas meter with disply, but not digital.
Now I’m interested in read out the values via wireless mbus (if possible).
I looked around very much, Smart EnergyCam 2.0 looks fine, but not supported anymore and very expensive.
Anybody here, has some Ideas what could be done? I allready searched for impuls detectors (for ferraris) counting the impulses (red point on circulating wheel) and impulse counters for gas meter magnetic wheel (if mine has got one, don’t know).
But I didn’t find a good tutorial for impulse sensors with a wireless M-Bus transmitter.
Hallo Jens,
the software runs on an ESP32CAM module/hardware.
It needs to be connected to your network via WIFI and it communicates via MQTT.
On OH end you need to use the MQTT binding to receive data.
Might be possible to read values via HTTP - I did not check that.
It is independent if you run your OH instance in docker or not.
It uses the digits that are displayed on your electricity/gas meter and uses OCR to recognize the numbers.
haven’t done it yet but parts are around here.
Yes, distance/sharpness could be a problem. There are instructions on the internet how to remove the lens.
EDIT: not the lens is to be removed but glue that prevents one from adjusting the focus
Same here, but I am thinking of connecting proximity switches directly to the GPIO on the raspberry Pi running the OH.
I looked in MQTTAny (search the forum if you are interested) but I didn’t manage to start the software.
I also had to purchase different proximity sensor since my first one with sensitivity of 4mm was not able to detect pulses on my water meter. I didn’t had time and will to test the new sensor that would be able to detect metal from 8mm yet
For a Ferraris meter I also recommend the AI-on -the-edge project. It has been running in my basement for several years measuring water consumption and a newer installation is recording electric energy consumption since beginning of the year.
Installing the software on the ESP32-cam is well described on the web page. The tricky thing is adjusting focus of the camera and reflections of the integrated LED.
Adjusting the focus requires removing a drop of glue from the lens thread before you can use a pair of pliers to (carefully) turn the lens. After that you should be able to turn it using your fingers only.
Getting rid of reflections caused by the LED flash is tricky. I used aluminum foil to reflect the Led 45° sideways and a second aluminum foil „mirror“ to illuminate the meter with (now diffused) light. Foil is better than a mirror because foil can be formed to disperse the light by forming it around your thumb.
The Esp-cam was simply glued to a thin plastic card which was then fixed to the metal in front of the meter with magnets. Simple but effective (and ugly, but nobody willever see it)
It works good, but not perfect. The last digit (0.1kWh) is often incorrect, but for me this is no big deal.
Overall, the solution is working great for me and was well worth the effort to get it working.
Got module working.
The module expects a MQTT Server. Did I read right, the MQTT Binding doesn’t include the server? So the EPS sends to mosquito and openhab fetches from mosquito again?
Found in the documentation that the wasserzaehler.html contains just the value of the ESPCam, but sadly with unneeded html stuff:
