During the comprehensive inspection of transforming substation,there are problems of low efficiency and large errors in manual reading of leakage current meters of lightning arresters.Thereby a handheld gadget was designed to facil-itate recording of lightning arrester leakage current meters.The new design mainly featured the introduction of image rec-ognition technology to achieve automatic recording of lightning arrester leakage current and discharge count and a defect judgement program to realize on-site judgment of arrester operating conditions.The effectiveness of the designed device was verified through simulation analysis.