Standard or noir for dark room LCD reading

[kaptainkatsu]

Hey all, I'm trying to make a remote camera for reading a utility meter's LCD screen and trying to decide to A: use white leds and the standard camera module, or B: use IR leds and the noir module.

Thanks

[goldberg]

I've been running two Pi Zeroes for around nine months to remotely read my electricity and gas meters.
I'm using motioneyeos with a Blinkt module attached to the GPIO pins.

I use crontab to switch the Blinkt on 10 seconds before each hour, shoot a still picture, then switch off Blinkt 10 seconds after each hour.

These have run reliably for the whole nine-month period, and I use a USB wifi module to retrieve the image data via rsync.

My main problem has been to position the standard (non-noir) camera relative to the light source to avoid reflections from the clear perspex front of the utility meter's display. It's a trial and error process to get it right, but it's possible that a circular polarising filter might help.