How screen scraping and TinyML can turn any dial into an API

This image shows a traditional water meter that's been converted into a web API, using a cheap ESP32 camera and machine learning to understand the dials and numbers. I expect there are going to be billions of devices like this deployed over the next decade, not only for water meters but for any older device that has a dial, counter, or display. I've already heard from multiple teams who have legacy hardware that they need to monitor, in environments as varied as oil refineries, crop fields, office buildings, cars, and homes. Some of the devices are decades old, so until now the only option to enable remote monitoring and data gathering was to replace the system entirely with a more modern version. This is often too expensive, time-consuming, or disruptive to contemplate.