Painfully Obvious.

A look at three successive attempts to make my scanner less annoying to use.

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.

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.

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.

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…

The best way to synchronize your monitor and marquee to your Pi’s power state without wiring up your own power outlet.

You might have noticed that your list of installed games looks a bit bland in EmulationStation without artwork, game descriptions, and the like. You could use the metadata scraper that comes with RetroPie, but for MAME games I think it’s better to leverage the pedantry of the community and fill your game lists with more reliable metadata.

For the moment I’m out of hardware topics, so let’s look at some stuff that might be more widely applicable to folks who don’t make my exact hardware choices.

It will have become clear to most readers that I swung for the fences on this project. The two ServoStiks I purchased prove the point: they can switch between 4‐way control and 8‐way control. Did I need this? No. Was I going to take advantage of it once I bought them? Of course.

Let’s make the poor‐man’s version of LEDBlinky: a way to light up specific buttons for specific games using a Pac‐Drive and some shell scripts.