Laundry. It’s one of life’s inescapable cycles, but at least we have machines now. The downside of this innovation is that since we no longer monitor every step — the rock-beating, the river-rinsing, the line-hanging and -retrieving — the pain of laundry has evolved into the monotony of monitoring the robots’ work.
[Adam] shares his wash-bots with roommates, and they aren’t close enough to combine their lights and darks and turn it into a group activity. They needed an easy way to tell when the machines are done running, and whose stuff is even in there in the first place, so [Adam] built a laundry machine monitor that uses current sensing to detect when the machines are done running and sends a text to the appropriate person.
Each machine has a little Hall effect-sensing module that’s carefully zip-tied around its power cable. The signal from these three-wire boards goes high when the machine is running and low when it’s not. At the beginning of the load, the launderer simply presses their assigned button on the control box, and the ESP32 inside takes care of the rest.
Getting a text when your drawers are clean is about as private as it gets. Clean underwear, don’t care? Put it on a scrolling marquee.
Looks like there’s a blog post on how this current sensor works: https://blog.moderndevice.com/?p=356
Something of a differential AC sensor: one hall effect sensor on either side of the AC power cable monitors the hot and neutral in the cord.
This will only work reliably with northern american flat 240V power cords, not so much with round single- and three-phase cables used elsewhere.
At the risk of being “that guy…”
The traditional mechanism for this is passing one lead through a CT coil (to avoid having to modify the appliance, you’d construct a plug and socket adapter).
Ok. And this doesn’t require modification of the appliance or an adapter.
With the added benefit of not having to fuck around with mains at all!
My washing cycles need 124 minutes.
If I was interested in monitoring when it’s due I’d just use a timer.
Is your timer based on a 555, if not its shit.
I recently bought a new washing machine; it come with WiFi…and there’s an app.
We live in a Golden Age.
Some washing machines can even schedule the heating cycle based on predicted solar output for that day and location.
I build something similar; arduino with motion sensor would detect when the machine stopped moving for 2mins. I do like this build as well.
Do you trust that company not to collect your usage data and sell it to Big Laundry? If not, this DIY hack keeps your dirty clothes data from airing out in public.