murdho / pi-read-meter

:zap: Raspberry Pi Reading Gas Meter! :movie_camera:

⚡ Pi Read Meter! 🎥

Raspberry Pi + Camera + pi-read-meter = reading gas meter every month automatically.

Instead of taking the number every month manually on the first day of a month, I made it automatic by one old Raspberry Pi Model B and Raspberry Pi NOIR camera V2.

Perfect use of Go in my opinion! I really enjoy building binary on my Mac, transporting it to Pi and running there. Very convenient!

How did I do it?

Here I'll go over the steps to set something similar up to yourself. These are notes for future self and for anyone who is interested in it.

Basic equipment

• (Gas/water/electricity) meter to read
• Raspberry Pi with memory card and connection to internet
• Raspberry Pi camera or some other camera. It must be possible to capture image using command line command.
• In case of dark room, some low consumption night light or similar might be necessary
• Other computer (can be done on Pi as well) to build Go binaries on (this code right here)

Setting it up from scratch

1. Get Raspbian (Lite is fine) running in your Pi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
2. Boot up the Pi and make sure to have access to the command line.
3. Check your Pi ARM version: cat /proc/cpuinfo
4. Clone this repository to a computer with Go installed
5. Change ARM version in Makefile if yours is different from the one I used in build-pi command.
6. Build the binary for Pi using make build-pi
7. When you have the binary, move it to Pi (using scp or some other means)
8. Move also the config.example.json from this repository to Pi
9. Modify config.example.json to have correct information
   1. capture_command for Pi camera is raspistill. If you use something else, make sure to change it in the config file.
   2. capture_command_args are passed in to the command. Modify these according to your needs. %s in this list of args denotes the file name where the image is saved.
   3. file_path is a full path to the captured image. %s here is replaced with date and time.
   4. dropbox_token can be acquired from https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps/create. Create an app with access to only its directory, this is where the images will be.
10. Run the binary on Pi: ./pi-read-meter-armv6 config.json (I hope you named your config config.json)
11. If all goes well, you should have the image in your Dropbox's app folder (/Apps/APP_NAME in Dropbox)
12. To make it run automatically, configure cron using crontab -e command. In there,
    1. Specify cron shell, I used bash like this: SHELL=/bin/bash
    2. Make it run every night:

       0 0 * * * /home/pi/pi-read-meter-armv6 config.json >> /home/pi/pi-read-meter.log 2>&1
       

       1. Assuming the binary is at /home/pi/pi-read-meter-armv6
       2. Assuming the config is at /home/pi/config.json
       3. Assuming that logs will be created to /home/pi/pi-read-meter.log
       4. Feel free to change it however you like better
13. Now enjoy the pictures coming to Dropbox!

I plan to add OCR at some point as well, so that Pi would be able to send the data "Pi" itself! 😍

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

If you are using it locally (in development), then use config.dev.json file for specifing the config.