How to record water meter readings and send them to email?

Question

Do it yourself

Hello, bandits!
I live in a dull gray city, a dull Khrushchev, and every month there is a question about reading water meters. That is, you need to open the shield in the bathroom, climb in there with a flashlight, rewrite the numbers that have come up, get dressed and go out into the cold, walk 30 meters to the box that hangs on the wall of the house. Or easier: Write an email to the management company, saying such and such an apartment, such and such testimony.
At a meeting at home, he pushed the topic that they say, let's put the tenants in automatic meters, otherwise we will soon roll back to the Stone Age. The tenants found out offers from local companies and said fuck you, better in the Stone Age than 120 euros from an apartment one-time and 1.5 euros for maintaining this system every month.
I'm tired of doing this on the first day of every month. But I live alone and no one else.
How I planned to do it, option A :
1) Order a Raspberry Pi and a camera module for it
2) [abracadabra] Program it all. [/abracadabra] (connecting to a network (wi-fi or I can throw a twisted pair cable, photographing, reading a file, reading numbers from an image, composing a letter and sending it to an email to myself and the company)
3) Install and forget.
How I planned to do it, option B :
1) Buy an android smartphone
2) And everything is the same as in the second paragraph above.
What questions arise :
1) Power supply of this system. Does the system have to be on all the time or can it be turned on once a month. Then poidee and batteries will suffice.
2) In what language it should be programmed.
3) Are there any options that are less collective-farm in execution, suddenly it can be done easier.
I would be glad if you point me in the right direction. I want to do it myself, rest api, graphs, react-angulars are already in my liver.

Answer 1

> I would be glad if you guide me on the right path.
You will spend a significant amount of time on the implementation of the project in hardware and on fine-tuning, as already rightly noted above.
Alternatively, you can use a purely software solution. Since you live alone, approximately the same amount of water is used every month. You can look at history and calculate how much you get on average, at the same time estimate seasonality - how much comes out on average in summer, and how much in winter, since you have a lot of free time.
Then set up periodic sending of forecast readings, adjusted for seasonality + engineering error, on certain days to an email to the management company.
From time to time - once every few months, just check how the predicted readings have run up with the real ones - and just adjust them in one direction or another ...

Answer 2

Judging by the Khrushchevs, you are somewhere in the post-USSR, but you count money in euros ... Ukraine?
Now it's all clear. You have too much free time.
No, seriously, don't take it as any kind of insult, but you just plan to do some bullshit indefinitely.
Calculate the time that you will spend on the implementation, fine-tuning and repair of your System and compare with the time that you supposedly save and quit this business.
U're welcome.

Answer 3

everyone else has already gone down that path. so it's worth reading what is already on the systems of electronic consumption accounting.
if you rest on a minimum, then a water meter-twist with a pulse output.
to it an electronic pulse counter and output to any data system.
this is really the minimum wage for the price and picking.

Answer 4

With cameras, this is definitely a perversion, it’s easier to buy suitable counters and read them with some kind of ESP8266

Answer 5

As far as I know, many meters use the MBus protocol. Whether they are certified for Russia, not in the know. There are also our meters, in which an impulse is generated with each revolution of the impeller (a dry contact is closed for a short time). Then just set the pulse counter (again, there are those that transmit the sum of the pulses via MBus) (the water consumption for one pulse is written on the water meter).

Answer 6

Any off-the-shelf solutions will require certification, i.e. those same 100 euros and maintenance
Yes, it’s not a problem to buy a water meter with RS485 (cook twice for 2500r-3000r) and any plumber will install them and the office will accept everything if there are documents, but the need for a piece of iron (if it’s based on raspberry or arduino ) that collect these readings and the software with which it will all work WILL NOT GO ANYWHERE, ready-made is also not free!
Therefore, stay on option B - buy a smartphone for 2t.r. (be very careful with the issue of energy consumption) set it to turn on automatically once a month and let it take a photo of your counters, analyze it and send it wherever you want. This is the CHEAPEST solution in your case.
ps about power consumption, when the phone is turned off, it will lie for 2-3 months and it will be noticeably discharged by self-discharge, there are models with a good sleep mode, which I had for a couple of months with the 'on the plane' mode turned on (I used it as a player) and did not blow in my mustache, and there is a model that will die even turned off in a week, because its shutdown is virtual.
If you have a battery for the desired voltage (or a controller, home-made is cheap) at a price of 300-600 rubles, you can power the phone from it, there will be enough energy for a year or more.

Answer 7

Right now I'm doing a "for the soul" water meter. The sensor is either Namur standard or a simple reed switch. Output to ePaper and to the cloud via Wifi. Power supply 2 AA batteries.
Welcome

Answer 8

There is a very good simple option, the ESP32 CAM module for $ 5, this is a very simple camera with Wi-Fi and a flashlight, the video stream is a set of pictures, it is very easy to do processing.

Answer 9

Does the management company really not have a personal account - where you can go and enter data from your PC - that's where the solution is. simple for an advanced European state!