Wrinkle-Free IoT Laundry Monitoring
Guy Dupont solved a common renting woe by installing a Particle Tachyon-based monitor in his building's laundry room to track availability.
Renting an apartment does have its advantages, like not having to mow the lawn or be responsible for any maintenance, but it also comes with a number of drawbacks. In Guy Dupont’s case, he has to share a pair of washing machines and dryers with 16 other apartments in his building. Not only does that make it tough to get his clothes clean, but it also means having to trudge up and down the steps carrying a heavy load of laundry time and again only to find that all of the machines are already occupied.
Short of convincing the owner of the building that more machines are needed (good luck with that!), there is nothing that can be done to increase capacity. But Dupont came up with an interesting idea that can at least get rid of unnecessary trips to the laundry room when all of the machines are in use. With a little help from technology, his apartment building now has a web page that monitors the status of the washers and dryers.
An inline power monitor might be the ideal choice to determine whether or not each machine is running, but the owner didn’t like that idea, so Dupont had to get creative. He decided to stick a Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 Sense development board to the side of each machine with magnets. To extend the life of their batteries, they only wake up once per minute to grab a short sample of audio from their microphones.
The audio from each XIAO board is wirelessly transmitted to a Particle Tachyon single-board computer, located in the same room, via Bluetooth Low Energy. The Tachyon has the computational horsepower to run an algorithm that classifies the sound to determine the present state of each machine (e.g., running, idle). Also, since the laundry room is out of range of Dupont’s Wi-Fi, the Tachyon’s built-in 5G connectivity was utilized. This cellular connection makes it possible for all of the tenants of the building to check the status of the washers and dryers on demand from their phones or computers.
To keep the building owner happy, this project had to be a bit more complicated than necessary. But even still, it was fairly simple to achieve the goal with modern technology.