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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/Marathon2021 on 2025-07-28 17:54:04+00:00.
I have a more serious use case for this, but for now I've just been testing it with a stock Amazon Blink camera, pointed at a bedside clock radio (with a box over the top of both to keep light out). And I'm able to "read" the time of day through both the seven segment analysis (the open source SSOCR library) and a little bit of template sensor work.
https://imgur.com/a/pb2M36C
I'm not going to go into all the iterations here, suffice it to say it probably took at least 50+ tweaks to config.yaml to get it just right. But I found ChatGPT to be helpful along the way and probably made more progress than without it. But, it would also "hallucinate" some things that absolutely were not real - and I'd have to go double-check it - like imagining that the "-C" operator would remove both decimal points and colons (wrong, it only does the former).
If you have a readout you want to capture data from -- for example, I'm probably going to set this up on our chest freezer -- it's interesting to look at. But it absolutely does take a lot of futzing with it.