My washer and dryer are two appliances that I’ve wanted to make “smart” for a long time, or at least smart enough to balance out how dumb I am about remembering to empty them when loads are finished. On several occasions, wet clothing has lingered in my washing machine for…
Post series: Laundry Spy
Building a thingy to tell me when my laundry cycles are done.
Laundry Spy, Part 2: The infrastructure
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Articles, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi, Tutorials
We need a broker between the laundry spy and the rest of the world, so here’s an abridged primer on setting up Node‐RED and MQTT on a Raspberry Pi.
Laundry Spy, Part 3: The software
It’s time to write the firmware for the hardware we made in Part 1. It’ll turn the raw acceleration data into determinations about when our machines are running and report its findings over MQTT to our home automation server.
Laundry Spy, Part 4: The finale
In this article — the finale to the series, I promise — you’ll actually install your laundry spy and calibrate it to your particular washer and dryer. Once you’ve got them working reliably, I’ll show you a few ESP8266 libraries that you can drop into this sketch (or others) if you crave more features.