To further enable the laziness of Bay13 residents, our washer and dryer are connected to the house network. This prevents the need to run down four flights of stairs to check if a dryer load is done and getting wrinkled.
Optical encoder wheels are attached to the cycle dials on the washer and dryer. IR phototransistor break-beam sensors can then tell if the unit is running by detecting clear or black stripes on the wheels. The phototransistors and LEDs that compose the sensors are connected to the parallel port of an old network-connected computer. A daemon written in Python provides an HTTP interface showing current state and history. It also sends Zephyrs (instant messages) when loads start up or complete.
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