AI/Machine Vision Water Meter Reader on a $12 CAD chip (plus Home Assistant integration)

In 2016 I bought and set up the emonPI Raspberry PI-based home energy monitor, which lets me trend and track energy consumption at home. 

Since then I've wanted to track water and gas usage, but until now I could not find any good solutions (within my abilities). We have an Elster C700 water meter but I was wary of tapping into the built-in digital encoder due to a tamper mechanism (this sentence also overstates my ability and ambition... I like solutions that someone else has pioneered first). 

This post is about deploying jomjol's AI-on-the-edge-device project to an ESP32-CAM module in order to get my analog water meter back into Home Assistant for monitoring, trending, and alarming. The audience is interested geeks and ESP32 beginners attempting to deploy this project for the first time. I'm going to expand on jomjol's instructions and talk about some of the mistakes I made along the way. I will also describe the kludgey, roundabout way I integrated data via MQTT back into Home Assistant. 

Results first: 

Home Assistant integration done!

Lots more details "after the jump".

How To Update Home Assistant Core Plugin on TrueNAS

Update, Feb 2022: Of course, I found better documentation here: https://github.com/tprelog/iocage-homeassistant/wiki/Updating-Home-Assistant. Original post below. 

Q: Will a king bed fit in our new house? A: Google Sketchup (awesome product!)

Robyn and I were trying to figure out whether a king bed will fit in our new house. To answer that question I immediately downloaded Google SketchUp, which is an awesome (and free!) CAD/drawing application.

Using the blueprints of our new house (possession: January!) that we got when we signed the contract, I had a mockup of our top floor, down to the inch, in about 90 minutes. I could have stopped at the bedroom, but we also wanted to see if my giant desk would fit in a spare bedroom.

So, will a king bed fit in our new master bedroom, and will there be room for bedside tables and dressers? The answer is definitely yes:

In 2009, SketchUp also helped me figure out if I could fit a queen bed in my apartment bedroom, along with my huge desk (split in two) and a bookshelf. The answer was yes - barely:

If you've used any CAD programs before, you'll adapt to SketchUp quickly. There are also lots of SketchUp video tutorials and lessons for beginners. SketchUp is a VERY handy program that can always answer the question "will it fit?" - so long as you know your room/house/whatever's dimensions!

Review: LaCité Apartments in Montreal

I'm at the end of a 14-month lease at LaCité Apartments in Montreal, and wanted to jot down some notes my on my experience here - hopefully this can help a random Googler decide if they want to sign a lease here. 

Here's my pros and cons, anonymous internet friends! 

Pros

• Awesome location. Close to McGill and the downtown core. It's a 20 minute walk to the Centre Bell, 10 minutes to St Laurent Blvd, and 10 minutes to Place Des Arts Metro station. 
• Clean, well-kept, high quality units. I posted some pictures of my apartment here and here. As tenants move, I think they're replacing old ugly carpets with faux-hardwood like my unit - looks better, in my opinion. 
• Amazing in-building services. The four LaCite buildings share an underground shopping complex with a grocery store, pharmacy, post office, barber, bank, liquor store, gym, cinema, and restaurants. 
• Concrete walls & floors ensure decent sound insulation. You can't hear voices or footsteps, but you can hear your neighbours if they're pounding their bass, or dropping bags of glass marbles on their tile floors. 
• The process to sign a lease is pretty straightforward, and the woman who helped me was very nice. 
• Overall the building's administration was really great and helpful. Because the LaCite complex is so big (1,200+ units) they have to play by the rules - they're less sketchy than some smaller landlords might be. 
• Underground parking is available (but I don't have a car, so I can't vouch for if it's good or not). 

Cons

• Rent is more expensive than other buildings in the area, but you're paying for the convenience of the location, the underground services and the administrative overhead. 
• The building administration slips a "Happy Birthday" note into your door frame on your birthday. Presumably they have this information from copying some form of photo ID during the lease-signing process. While this is a well intentioned gesture, I found it creepy because I didn't authorize them to use my personal information in that way. 
• LaCite staff tell you they will never enter your apartment without your explicit permission. This is not true. Due to the size of the complex, they equate "slipping a notice under your door" with "receiving your explicit permission". Yearly smoke detector inspection notices are slipped into door frames that say (paraphrased) "someone will enter your unit some time next week, just FYI". The most stunning to me was when a LaCite agent let an interested future renter into my apartment without my permission while I was in Saskatoon for Christmas. Their justification was the two notices that they slipped under my door.... while I was out of town, unable to read them. When they saw the unopened notices, they didn't phone me to get my permission to enter - they showed my apartment to the stranger anyway. This is unacceptable to me - I don't think anyone would be comfortable with the idea of a stranger checking out their home without their knowledge. 

Would I rent here again? Yes, overall it's been a wonderful place to live. But I would have a second lock installed on my door (an option available to tenants) and not provide the administration office with a copy of the key. I'd be happy to leave it unlocked for smoke detector inspections, but I would absolutely leave it locked during long absences. 

LaCite website: http://montreal.lacite.ca/apartments.html

The Shit Night Before A Midterm

Some people haven't heard this true story yet. I think it's a story told best with rhymes.

---

'Twas the night before a midterm, little Brahm sat in his house,
Reading textbooks on Hertz, Maxwell, Ampere and Gauss.

As the clock struck ten-thirty - the signal for bed,
Little Brahm packed up his books, and laid down his head.

Little Brahm drifted asleep, but a sound jolted him awake!
A drip-drip-drip in the bathroom - did the plumbing break?

He threw back the covers with a frustrated wrath,
But found no leaks in the shower, sink, toilet or bath.

The drip-drip-drip continued, and little Brahm's eyes grew wide,
He pressed his ear to the wall; the sound was coming from inside.

What did this mean? Had a pipe split in the wall?
The apartment was ancient, so the odds weren't so small.

"I SUMMON YOU, DAVE!" Brahm bellowed into the night.
Well, 'twas a phone call, and it was slightly more polite.

As Landlord Dave confirmed he was on his way over,
Little Brahm mopped the water that was pooling on the floor.

Landlord Dave burst through the door just in time to consume
The sight of water pouring from the light switch in little Brahm's room.

Little Brahm pulled the breaker and Landlord Dave ran out back,
To turn off the water, disabling the aqueous attack.

While Dave was out, little Brahm knelt to feel the pool,
Trying to glean whether the burst pipe was hot or cool.

As Brahm arose, Dave returned to give him a scare;
"It was the toilet," He exclaimed, "It was the toilet upstairs!"

The neighbours above had plugged the toilet before sleep,
The water in their unit hadn't roused them in the least.

Little Brahm looked at his hand, which he'd just dunked in shit,
Shit water from the walls, simply a maelstorm of shit!

Brahm cleaned up the shit water with his trusty mop and pail,
and washed the shit from his hands, trying not to inhale.

So if you hear dripping in your walls, there's a lesson, of course:
Don't touch the water to diagnose the source.

New House, New Server

I've decided that once Robyn and I buy a house - sometime next spring - I will need to dedicate a closet somewhere to housing a (more) powerful media server. I am getting too nerd-excited about this already.

I've got my eye on this rack-mountable enclosure that can hold 11 hard drives:

And some type of real - but tiny - server rack from these guys like this:

In terms of components, I'm thinking about something along these lines:

• Windows Home Server 2011 (I have Version 1 on my current server and love it. So easy to use, super easy backups, and easy music/video streaming to Xbox 360)
• 750 Watt PSU
• 2x 2TB Hard Drives (just for starters - then I'll move over the 5TB of capacity I have in my existing server, READY2SERVE).
• 4GB RAM (but RAM is so friggin' cheap - I've seen $30 for each 4GB, so 8GB would be $60)
• Some dual or quad-core CPU (not too fancy - this server will mostly serve media, run backups and download things)

I think I can do everything but the server rack for under $700. In my opinion - totally worth it!

Also on my wish-list for the magical server closet (extra costs):

• Have a 120V AC outlet installed inside this not-yet-existent closet;
• Slatted closet doors for easy ventilation;
• Have the internet wired directly into the closet, where a router will feed a gigabit switch. The switch can feed hard-wired ethernet ports beside the entertainment centre (Xbox 360) and an office/den, if we have one. I also want to hide a wireless router somewhere in the house (maybe on the ceiling) for maximum wifi coverage. 

And most importantly: does anyone have any good ideas for a server name? And is it crazy that I put a lot of thought into naming computers? My current server is READY2SERVE, my laptops BRAHMTOP (died last summer) and DETHPAD (current, named for Dethklok), and my desktops have been PERCEPTION, DECEPTION, INDUCTION, and PERSUASION. I feel like it's bad form to use a name twice.

Typical

This happened a year ago.

This happened last night:

Text from my roommate before I rushed over: "OMFG! The bathtub is filling with shit! What do I do!?"

I ran over and thankfully it was just dirt. Lots of dirt. And it didn't go over the edge of the tub. Very lucky, compared to last years' big flood (see link in first word of this blog post).

The Year of the Flood

Woke up to this on June 30th (my room, view looking in): 

Outside my room:

Bathroom... Just lovely.

I TRIED TO ROTATE YOU WHY DON'T YOU ROTATE!!!!!!!!

Kitchen

The scariest thing: the water line in our entryway during the flash flood. This must have happened AFTER we got home from a concert at midnight and BEFORE we woke up at 6am. Thank goodness the door was mostly sealed shut.

The only, ONLY thing that got damaged? My friggin' laptop that I BARELY ever use. I started using it again recently to write blog posts at the kitchen table instead of in my room. When it didn't turn on, I let it sit in a container of rice for 24 hours. But because it had been plugged in while sitting on the dining area floor, something was fried. I opened it up and took it apart to find the damage:

Alas! I believe the only damaged chip is the one that makes the laptop not broken!

After the clean-up:

Looks good, except for the floors. 

In the end we lucked out, the only damage to personal belongings was my 6-year-old laptop (which I have been secretly itching to replace) and a few cheap floor mats. Plus my room-mate's room was completely unscathed. Plus it was dirt, and not sewage. Maybe this makes us the luckiest of all.

We have it better than what my landlord will have to deal with (considering the floors) and a heck of a lot better than a lot of people in Saskatoon had it, from what I heard on the news.