Image: community.home-assistant.io
Worked Proof shown
An old mechanical gas meter read by a €10 ESP32 camera
Claude reads the dials from camera snapshots, with no special image training.
—
Earliest dated source:
The full story
An old mechanical gas meter with rolling digits and no pulse output feeds Home Assistant's Energy dashboard using a €10 ESP32-CAM. Every 15 minutes an automation turns on the flash, grabs a snapshot and sends it to Claude Haiku through Home Assistant's AI Task, which returns the digits as structured data. There's no need to mark regions of the image or train a TensorFlow Lite model.
How it was done
Tools
Themes
Loading themes…
Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Home Assistant forum: Reading an old mechanical gas meter with a €10 ESP32-CAM and Claude (AI Task) – no ROI, no TFLitePublished
The forum post with set-up details and example images.