ICOUNTER - Development of an Optical Readout Method for Mechanical Counters

摘要

Mechanical counters are still very common in electricity, water and gas meters. Automatic readout of the dial count without modifying the mechanics of the counter is only possible using expensive image processing methods. Therefore the topic of this report is a new method for automatically reading out the counter values without the need of additional mechanical or parallel electronic parts inside the counter. Instead the different reflection properties of the different digits are measured and evaluated. This is done using only simple electronic parts and a microcontroller. In the first part of the paper the hardware for measuring the reflection values is presented. A model of this hardware with special emphasis on the influences of the environment is discussed in the next part. Following this, two classification methods, for distinguishing the digits are analyzed. For showing the properties of the new readout system measurements and simulations are given in the end.