Water Meter Readings Straight Into Home Assistant

The camera pointed at my old water meter does more than take pictures: it recognises the digits on the dial and turns them into a number.

Behind it runs an open-source project called AI on the edge device, on a small ESP32 camera board — meaning the recognition happens on the board itself, not on some server.

From there the value travels via MQTT, a lightweight messaging protocol for small devices, into Home Assistant, where it lands next to all my other house data.