I wanted a way to add our natural gas consumption into Home Assistant, so I built a thing. It uses a ESP32 camera board, 2000mAh LiPO cell, BMS, and 4 solar cells. I found an AI On The Edge package that did all the heavy lifting. All I need to do was flash the ESP, configure the gauge layout, and setup the MQTT messages. The hardest part was polishing the gas meter window so that it could actually be read.
I stopped using this because I did not feel comfortable having a LiPo in direct sun, charging using a cheap BMS, on top of my gas meter. I plan to run 3/5V out to it and delete the solar/BMS/Lipos.
