With the help of Bob, I created a water monitor system using a RaspPi5 and camera.
Bob, is the IBM AI code developer.
This program has a web app for calibration so you can provide reference points and then the center of the red and blue dial and boxes around the digits.
It then can read the dial and digits AND monitor the blue dial for small amounts of water change. If the dial is over the digits it detects that and uses the cached count along with the fractional amount from the dial. The Pi has its own mosquitto broker so if can publish mqtt information directly to Hubitat. What is incredible is that the code will draw the detected dial angle AND the dots (dark blue) that it detected the dial at the radius (light blue) that it scans for the dial. Sometimes the OCR gets it wrong on the white on black but it checks if the total reading it got went lower and it will reject it. Still tweaking a few things but Bob really did the job.
As our friends over the pond would say, and Bob's your uncle... 
That is really cool...would never have even considered this approach. Some folks are going to want you to share this at some point. 
This all really makes me wish that I had a reasonable way to get power to a camera next to my water meter. Mine is out in the front yard right next to the sidewalk, and I don't have any power anywhere near it. Mentioned to wife that I might run an extension cord down the front yard to the meter, and you can probably imagine how that went. 
I'm actually already monitoring my water use with the Flume meter which works quite well, but I really love the idea of being able to see the meter remotely...
FYI …update …could NEVER get OCR of the digits to be reliable…very frustrating…. I finally simplified it to input reading from the digits and then track the red dial to catch every revolution and then as a sanity check do template matching for the last digit. Due to the nature of the digits on a tumbler and the part of the next digit showing, even that was a challenge. Finally got it reliable though… mostly posting to warn OCR is not trivial : )
Mine is in a pit in the front lawn. It’s got an access cover, but no room for anything inside. It’s great for aesthetics 
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I think I’ve about wrapped up development of the water meter app… thanks to Claude… it is super accurate at keeping track of the dial and last digit so it can produce very accurate water usage. I added a water usage graph to the web server
and for the low usage it captures the blue water dial to see small changed
and each time I reboot I get an email with the cloudflare web site so I can check access the web server anywhere without messing with router. I also have it export the gallons, gallons/hr and gallons per day for use by grafana
