and in that arena [jomjol] has a very neat solution involving an ESP32 camera module and a software neural network to identify meter readings directly. The ESP and camera sit at the top of a 3D ...

Just a few years ago, had someone asked you how much a digital camera with WiFi would cost, you probably wouldn’t have said $6. But that’s about how much [Bitluni] paid for an ESP32-CAM.