Local AI Turns a Dumb Gas Meter Into a Smart One
Some of the best automation projects solve problems that nobody wants to deal with. After growing tired of crawling under the stairs each month to read his gas meter, maker Cian Gallagher built a Raspberry Pi-powered system that watches the display around the clock. A custom-trained computer vision model running entirely on the Pi reads the meter automatically, logs gas usage to Home Assistant, and can submit readings directly to the utility company on schedule.
Gallagher's system uses a Raspberry Pi 4, a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3, and a small light mounted inside the meter cupboard. Every ten minutes, a cron job captures a fresh image, rotates it to compensate for the upside-down camera orientation, crops it to the region containing the meter display, timestamps the image, and stores it locally. Over several weeks, this process accumulated thousands of photographs that became the foundation of the machine learning model.
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