RUNTIME ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION

INFORMATION WITH SMS FEATURE (P1826)

Group Members:
AHMED BILAL 180560

BACHELOR OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

FALL-2021

PROJECT SUPERVISOR
DR. MUHAMMAD IMRAN FARID
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING

FACULTY OF ENGINEERING
AIR UNIVERSITY, ISLAMABAD
ABSTRACT

Every system around us is becoming automatic and making our lives more com-
fortable. Our idea is to develop an automatic electricity billing which is very es-
sential in our daily life. At present, an employee from the electricity board visits
regularly once in a month, takes the meter reading and submits these readings
to the office. The office generates a bill on the basis of meter reading. The accu-
racy of this method is less due to human interventions. As a result, Automatic
Electricity Bill concept is developed in which the collection of meter reading,
processing of the reading and sending the bill to customer is done automatically.
This method involves a camera which is used to take the image of meter reading.
The captured image is then processed and the meter reading is extracted. The
bill amount is calculated and is send to customer as SMS via GSM module. An
alert message will also be sent to the consumer during peak hours.

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INTRODUCTION

Electricity is one of the most important blessings that science has given to
mankind. It has also become a part of modern life and one cannot think of a
world without it. In day to day life, each and every device from machinery to
wrist watch everything works on electricity. In these days in every sectors, there
are number of consumers which use the electricity but they are not satisfied with
the services provided by power distribution companies. This traditional energy
meter billing techniques uses huge number of readers and also long working
hours to gather complete data and to prepare bill. In order to avoid this, we
are designing a system that will provide the electricity bill to consumer digitally
anytime they want. First a camera with a WiFi module such as Esp-32 is in-
stalled in front of the energy meter. After receiving the command send by the
consumer, the camera will capture the image and will send it to the Personal
Computer. Sometimes the energy meter is placed in a location which are not
easily accessible, also if door is closed reading can’t be taken in first visit and
the reader have to revisit that house. Our proposed system is easily terminating
the problem. Now the image processing techniques will be used in such as im-
age Acquisition, Grey level image, Image enhancement, Image Segmentation.
The image processing will be done on the MATLAB or other suitable software.
When the image is properly visible then the digits will be extracted from the im-
age using python module like Pytesseract. When the image is properly visible
then the digits will be extracted from the image. Then the previous reading will
be subtracted from the obtained reading, this will get us the units consumed by
the consumer. Now by adding the tariff, the cost of the electricity will be send to
the consumer through GSM module to their mobile phone and to the web server
or GUI simultaneously. Receiving bill on the mobile phone reduces the paper
wastage and also there is a great chance of bill to be misplaced. Due to real-time
information of the bill, consumers will estimate their monthly bill and they can
save their electricity cost by decreasing the load.

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AIM OF THE PROJECT

The possible application of the project is to computerized the electricity billing

and allows the consumer to examine their bill anytime just by sending com-
mand. The main objective is to send the bill to the consumers on their mobile
phones rather than typical paper bill. In manual billing system, meter reader
comes to each and every house and takes the reading of the meters for further
process. At the end of the month consumers received their bill. This is a very
time taking process as many humans are involved from meter reader to the em-
ployee who generates the bill during the whole process. Many malpractices
has been done in the past during the calculations of the bill To overcome this
problem our system provides direct solutions.With proper authentication, users
can access the developed web page details from anywhere in the world. The
complete monthly usage and due bill is messaged back to the customer after
processing these data. Also paper bill has many drawbacks such as increase of
paper wastage and misplacing of the bill. Our designed system will eradicate
this problem

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APPLICATIONS

1. Examine the Cost Before the Month: Consumers have the option to check
their real-time bill and by estimating the monthly bill amount, they can
save their cost by decreasing their load.

2. Digitized bill: Supplier company will not have to hire a complete staff
from meter reader to bill generator as they can simply send the bill to
their mobile phones.

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DESIGNED AND IMPLEMENTATION

Code:

The main part of our project is to extract the digits from the image. Till now
we have managed to extract the text from the image which contains digits in
seven segments display.We have used Pycharm as a compiler and python as
programming language.Basically we are applying image processing techniques
to recognize and extract the digits.
Source Code: Lines 2-5 import our required Python packages. We’ll be using
imutils, our series of convenience functions to make working with OpenCV +
Python easier. Imutils can be easily installed in Pycharm.

Figure 1: Source Code(I)

Lines 9-20 define a Python dictionary named DIGITS-LOOKUP.We simply de-

fined this lookup table where key to the table is the seven segment array.

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Loads image from disk

Figure 2: Source Code(II)

To obtain the digits we need to threshold the image to reveal the dark regions
against the lighter background.

Figure 3: Source Code(III)

Join the fragment digit parts

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Figure 4: Source Code(IV)

Rotate the image so that the digits are straight.

Figure 5: Source Code(V)

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Finding contours in the thresholded image, and putting the bounding box on the
image.

Figure 6: Source Code(VI)

We start looping over each of the digit contours on Line 87. For each of these
regions, we compute the bounding box and extract the digit ROI

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Figure 7: Source Code(VII)

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Figure 8: Source Code(VIII)

Calculation for Electricity Bill from Meter Reading through camera:

• Now we have everything that is needed to calculate the bill. Just take your
previous month’s bill and note the reported reading. Once done, subtract
it by the current reading of this month. The result would be the readings
you have consumed this month. Then multiply it with the rate of kWh,
and you’ll get the final bill. It can be summarized as:

• Reported Reading (from previous month’s bill) – Current Reading =

Total kWh (used since last month)

• Total kWh x Charges per kWh (mentioned above) = Total Energy

Charge

• This isn’t over yet. Now you have to add additional charges written on
your bills like surcharge, variable charges, general sales tax, and duty on
electricity, TV license fee, , and meter rent. Add these, and you’ll get the
final bill.

• Total Energy Charge + Additional Charges = Final Bill.

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Air University Information with SMS Feature.

Block Diagram

Figure 9: Project Block Diagram

*Processing Device can be Rasberry Pi or any other cheap alternative.

Block diagram comprises of the following system set up:

Step 01: A camera with a WiFi module like Esp-32 is installed in front of the
meter.

Step 02: After receiving the command from the user camera will capture the
image..

Step 03: The it will send the image through WiFi module to the processing
device.

Step 04: Now the image processing technique will be used to convert this
image into text digits.

Step 05: When the text is extracted from the image, bill will be calculated
through formula.

Step 06: Now this bill will be sent to the user through GSM module and up-
loaded on the specific web server simaltaneously.

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Step 07: An alert message will be sent to the consumer during peak hours.

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CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

This system will be very ef[U+FB01]cient and fast to calculate real-time bill at
any time user wants to check. After the bill calculation, it will be sent to both
consumer and power supplying company with maintaining accuracy. Also one
of main purpose of this System is to save consumer bill at peak hours as power
supplying company charges per unit are much higher than rest of day.So, a spe-
cific threshold units value will be set if the user will consume more units than
threshold, an alert message will be sent to him at that time. So, that the user
can shift load to other power sources like solar system etc. Also this system will
eliminate need of humans(meter readers) and hence billing will be more accu-
rate , error free and reduce corruption when avoiding manual readings.As there
is a scope for improvement and advancement so, as a future implementation we
can add a payment method from the user mobile phone

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