Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can provide tele-measurement for legacy utility meters (water, natural gas, electricity etc) and can be accepted as a low-cost extension for the capabilities of these counters and for their time of life. On the other side, the “galvanic separation” provided by optical acquisition of displayed counter values offers the confidence of secure reading - for natural gas meters and similar instruments. Our cost-effective solution enables simple snapshots of counters displays (with simple devices like an “ArdtrCarn” - camera for Arduino embedded solutions), local “edge computing” for image packing (in. BMP format) and tele-transmission via the WiFi hot-spot of the intelligent building. At the server-side, National Instruments software sub-systems - NI Vision Development Module and LabView- provide OCR and cloud aggregation of measured values. Our solution is related to a research project for cloud-based smart metering (the LabVIEW sub-system belongs to the communications work-package). Specific to our contribution is the re-balancing of local and centralized processing, involving an assisted learning phase for the OCR.