I created a solution…with a pi 4 but it just doesn’t seem to work very well. OCR is very finicky and while I was able to get pytesseract to pull the images off of a webcam, the numbers that get returned are very wrong. It looks like they only allow businesses to pull the powermeter data if I am reading this right: https://www.pge.com/en/save-energy-and-money/energy-saving-programs/smartmeter.html
My rate has increased 6 times this year, so power is very expensive here: 50c per KWH…on the lowest consumption rate. I need to figure out how to cut back or get solar panels. But I want to see in near real time how much energy we are using.
Don’t know about PGE’s API, but for the OCR stuff, you may get better results with additional preprocessing before you pass images into tesseract. e.g. crop it to just the region of interest, and try various image processing techniques to make the text pop out better if needed. You can also run tesseract specifically telling it you’re looking at a single line of data, which can give better results. (e.g.
--psm 7for the command line tool) OCR is indeed finicky…Ill try it out. I put psm 11 at one point, but got 000000 back out unless my camera was just in the perfect spot. Then i would get around 1/2 the numbers right.