water meter / Wasserzähler - AI-on-the-edge by jomjol

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

This is a system to take pictures of a water meter for house monitoring the water consumption. It is a part of a house automation system in order to monitor and check the water consumption.
The system conists of 3 major parts:
Round clamping adapter to my watermeter = screwless fixation system on water meter, that can be adjusted to the individual geometries
Tube towards camera - here done with two parts to allow heights adjustment
Camera holder for ESP32-CAM with OV2640. The ESP32-CAM modules has an inbuild flash LED, so no additional illumination is needed.
The 3D printed parts are connected with a self made spherical bajonet connection (see here)
The camera is a all-in-one image processing device: AI-on-the-edge - also described here: https://github.com/jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device/wiki
In order to use it as a water meter, the fixed foucs objective of the OV2640 has to be manipulated, as it only results in sharp image for distance bigger than ~40cm. By this the image of the water meter is getting too small for further automated readout processing.ATTENTION: this will end any warranty as the sealing of the lens objective is broken!
I removed the fixation glue of the OV2640 lens with a sharp knife (see picture). After this I could screw the objective in and out. Rotating it by about a quarter counterclockwise results in a focus plane about 10cm to the lens. You need to figure out your best setting with a little bit of try and error for your specifig environment.
Everything is done within the ESP32-module and on the SD card as data storage. The detailed description of the electronic setup can be found here:https://github.com/jomjol/water-meter-system-complete.
There is an intensive discussion on the usage and details in the iobroker forum. This discussion is in German.
For more information do not hesitate to contact me!
Have fun,
jomjol
P.S.: This system is an improved version of https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3860911.
Improvement:
No additional external server is needed, the image processing and conversion is fully integrated in the ESP32CAM firmware.
integrated web server as user interface for configuration etc.