I'm tired of these $200 water bills when the sprinkler breaks or (like this month) a hose gets turned on and forgotten. The home water meter looks something like:
The meter is near an ethernet switch and the new Netduino Plus looks like a nifty way to have something watch the meter and email alerts when something bad happens. I'm hoping an IR sensor could be rigged to count passes of the larger hand, but it'd be even cooler if I had something with the resolution to either pick out the smaller flow spinner, or heck, OCR the numbers. (they're actually White on black on my meter)
did you check to see if it might have permanent magnets - if so you might be able to use a reed switch to count.
if you can get a model number and manufacture you might be able to google a spec sheet for your meter.
also google gas and or electric meter reading - a while back I found some pages on reading color change on dials i.e. black to white with ir - or something like that.
I'll see if I can't find the links and repost here if I find them.
Yeah, I'm at the office, so there's a limit to the research I can do from here. It looks like the one shown, but it's not exactly the same. I was windering if I could get a close-focus IR sensor with enough sensitivity to see the big hand going around. That'd be most likely enough for what I need. (18 hours if unattended hose is 7000 gallons of water. If I could get an sms or email alert at 100 gallons, I'd be happy.) If if the precision were available, it'd be cool to monitor useage more closely.
(If you haven't guessed, I'm trying to avoid any major plumbing modifications.)
FWIW, there's a transmitter box with a cable going to the meter that permits the water company to take readings...which might be another avenue to explore.
Lots of interestingness. It's a Badger 'Recordall Transmitter Register', which has as a major feature, 'featuring a non-proprietary protocol'. It's got connectors and splitters and features and add-ons.
I believe there are ultrasonic sensors that can be externally mounted to a pipe. My guess is they tell you velocity but knowing the diameter of the pipe should give you the flow rate.
I don't know how pricey they are. And I don't know if you could adapt one of the common ultrasonic sensors to do this.
That's a good point on the focus at some distance you would get nothing - I wasn't thinking so much of needing to focus the mouse eye but reading dark vs not dark - or having a dark line in the picture. I'm not even sure that the arduino could process a characteristic (in this case a line) within the eye but you might be able to check bits to see if there all dark at fixed locations.