Hello everyone,

I am working on a solution to read my analog water meter automatically. A reading is performed every minute and involves three steps:

1. take a picture of the physical water meter
2. analyze the picture to extract the value (e.g. 123.4567 m3)
3. upload the value to Home Assistant

For development purposes, I use an Android phone with OpenCamera to take pictures regularly, with the flash. Then I transfer them manually to my PC to process them. I have already implemented the steps 2 and 3 in Python and OpenCV for the image processing, this is not a problem anymore.

Now the question is how to automate everything. Ideally, the 3 steps would run on the same device. Python on Android is not trivial, so I thought that Ubuntu Touch help. I saw it as "Linux" on a mobile phone, but after installation on a Pixel 3a, I realize that it is has also limitations due to its nature as phone or tablet OS. For instance, I cannot just install the apt packages I need in the root system. I looked quickly into the app development, it looks possible in Python, but I am not sure if I will hit other limitations, like having an app taking continuously pictures.

Do you have general recommendations for me on the best general strategy?

Thanks!