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.
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.