Automatic Number Plate Recognition project

There are quite a few project described on the web that will take a video feed and tell you the number plate.
I first came across ANPR (Automatic number plate recognition) while driving through a nearby gated community and seeing my plate flashed up in front of me. How did they do that...
Then Hackspacemag v11 landed on my mat and there was how to do it on a Raspberry Pi. The article recommended a Pi model 3B so clearly this is a heavy processing task. Well all I had was a Pi Zero which had been sitting doing nothing for a considerable time, so I thought I'd give it a try. I invested in a cheap IP camera of eBay and followed their instructions. It worked, although the Pi Zero really struggles but proof of concept gave me the confidence to invest in a Pi 3A+. I went for the 3A+ because it has the grunt of the recommended 3B but connects wirelessly as I don't have Ethernet cables built into my house, pity...
All these magazine articles assume basic knowledge and I don't have that so I thought I would write up how I did it and the issues I had and the things I have learned along the way.
I also didn't want to get into IFTT stuff but simply wanted an email listing the number plate of the vehicle that had just arrived in my drive together with a photo of it.
Eyes down, look in.

The Project Details
I will assume you've setup your Raspberry Pi. I followed the instructions on the Getting started with the Raspberry Pi and the only issue I had was when using the power supply that had worked fine on my Pi Zero, at about 14% into the instal it failed with a low voltage error. I fixed this by using a beefier 1.8A supply. Then Raspbian installed perfectly.

I use a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse unit called Rii i8BT which I purchased off Amazon.
It works great once you tell the system its a US keyboard. This is because the default Raspberry Pi keyboard layout is "gb" and the Rii i8BT is "us".

So to do this, in a Terminal Window type the following:
sudo nano /etc/default/keyboard
In the file that opens change XKBLAYOUT="gb" to XKBLAYOUT="us"
Then type CTRL+O to save, press Enter to confirm and type CTRL+X to close the editor.
Then reboot by typing
sudo reboot
Now whenever you start you Raspberry Pi all the buttons on your Rii i8BT will work correctly.

With your Pi all working it's time to instal the OpenANPR software.
In a terminal window type the following:

            
wget -O - https://deb.openalpr.com/openalpr.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://deb.openalpr.com/master/ trusty main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/openalpr.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openalpr openalpr-daemon openalpr-utils libopenalpr-dev
            
	  

Now you need to transfer a picture of your car onto your Pi. Take a picture from the front of your car with the (cleaned) number plate clearly visible and save it as cartest.jpg
To transfer the picture I used WinSCP which can be downloaded from their website here.
Then for it all to work you have to enable SSH on your Pi and setup WinSCP on your PC and there are some simple instructions here.
So use winSCP to move the picture of your car from your PC to the pi user's home directory /home/pi.
Then in a terminal window run the following command (for those of you in the UK)

            
alpr -c gb cartest.jpg