Those little ESP32-CAM boards which mate the WiFi-enabled microcontroller with a small parallel-interface camera module have been with us for years, and while they are undeniably cool to play with ...

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 ...

Additionally, he explored an alternative approach without removing any hardware. Instead, he used the Roomba Open Interface ...