Planet Arduino

The maker movement often focuses on creation, but we should never overlook repair. In a consumer market increasingly moving towards planned obsolescence, manufacturers often fail to devote any resources towards the repair of their products. In many cases, replacement parts are unavailable or prohibitively expensive. But the maker skill set can provide recourse, as demonstrated by Balakrishnan Prashanth’s Arduino-based solution for a washing machine’s failed timer display.

Like many modern washing machines, Prashanth’s Whirlpool has a digital readout that displays the time remaining in a cycle. It’s a handy feature, but not one that is absolutely necessary to wash clothes. Unfortunately, this Whirlpool disagrees. They designed this model’s control board so that the entire machine’s functionality comes to a screeching halt if the digital display stops working. The control board sends data to the display and expects an acknowledgment. If it doesn’t receive that acknowledgment, it won’t let the washing machine run through a cycle. That’s what happened when Prashanth’s machine’s display failed.

Prashanth solved this problem using an Arduino Mega 2560. He determined that the Whirpool’s control board sends data to the display module via I2C and expects a confirmation from the module. Instead of trying to replicate the complete functionality of the display module, Prashanth chose to omit the display altogether — it is, after all, unnecessary. He put the Arduino in the display module’s place and programmed it to simply blink an LED when it receives I2C messages from the control board. It then sends a confirmation back to the control board, tricking it into proceeding with the normal wash cycle.

The post Arduino resurrects a washing machine that failed for silly reasons appeared first on Arduino Blog.

After three short years of use, Roni Bandini’s Samsung washing machine started to act erratically, and several technicians looked at it without really fixing the problem. Bandini then decided to take matters into his own hands and replaced its brains with a MKR WiFi 1010 board, along with four relays and a trio of buttons.

This new system can control the motor and valves to progress through a wash cycle. It also takes advantage of the Arduino’s WiFi abilities to integrate with Telegram, sending a message to the entire family when the laundry is done.

Future goals for the project include varying the motor speed and making it reverse, but so far it’s a brilliant way to keep a large hunk of metal and plastic out of the junkyard. Code is available on GitHub, and print files for the enclosure are up on Thingiverse.

When you think of world-changing devices, you usually don’t think of the washing machine. However, making laundry manageable changed not only how we dress but how much time people spent getting their clothes clean. So complaining about how laborious our laundry is today would make someone from the 1800s laugh. Still, we all hate the laundry and [Andrew Dupont], in particular, hates having to check on the machine to see if it is done. So he made Laundry Spy.

How do you sense when the machine — either a washer or a dryer — is done? [Andrew] thought about sensing current but didn’t want to mess with house current. His machines don’t have LED indicators, so using a light sensor wasn’t going to work either. However, an accelerometer can detect vibrations in the machine and most washers and dryers vibrate plenty while they are running.

The four-part build log shows how he took an ESP8266 and made it sense when the washer and dryer were done so it could text his cell phone. He’d already done a similar project with an Adafruit HUZZAH. But he wanted to build in some new ideas and currently likes working with NodeMCU. While he was at it he upgraded the motion sensor to an LIS3DH which was cheaper than the original sensor.

[Andrew] already runs Node – RED on a Raspberry Pi, so incorporating this project with his system was a snap. Of course, you could adapt the approach to lots of other things, as well. The device produces MQTT messages and Node – RED subscribes to them. The Pushover handles the text messaging. Node – RED has a graphical workflow that makes integrating all the pieces very intuitive. Here’s the high-level workflow:

You might wonder why he didn’t just have the ESP8266 talk directly to Pushover. That is possible, of course, but in part 2, [Andrew] enumerates some good reasons for his design. He wants to decouple components in the system for easier future upgrades. And MQTT is simple to publish on the sensor side of things compared to API calls which are handled by the Raspberry Pi for now.

Laundry monitoring isn’t a unique idea and everyone has a slightly different take on it, even some Hackaday authors. If phone notification is too subtle for you, you can always go bigger.