LaundryMaxxing

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project comes from a real struggle faced in Valour house. Our whole 19 story building is only serviced by but 1 single laundry room with 10 washers and 10 dryers. Many a times it is often full and I bring all my clothes down only to have to wait for a washer still. Another student tried to implement a QR code solution where users will scan a QR code to indicate they have started using a washer/dryer, however as it turns out, many students did NOT end up scanning, making the system wholly unreliable, but who can blame them, scanning a QR code inconvenient after all.

What it does

We have created a IoT laundry machine operating detector and interfaced it with a Telegram bot to service and inform residents in real time which machines are available, and which are not.

How we built it

Our main mechanism uses a vibration sensor to detect if the machine is in use, the logic on the microcontroller is simple, send good vibrations. While the main brain in the Cloud handles false positives and also keeps track of operating time to also sync with the Telegram API.

Challenges we ran into

As a CS student this is my first time working with hardware, turning this project into fruition required using toolchains out of my comfort zone and working many layers of the computing stack, such as physical hardware (like doing actual soldering on the motherboard), hardware programming, networking interfacing, and cloud deployment of our MQTT server AND one more for the python server.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am very proud that we have a actually functional product with a very practical use case, we were able to establish this in the short time period given. Working with hardware requires me to muster skills where ChatGPT cannot help, that one took abit of courage too haha.

What we learned

How to solder without burning myself

What's next for LaundryMaxxing

We plan to write a proposal to Valour House to inquire about the possibility of actually implementing it. (This one requires us to access NUS IoT wifi, if not we can install our own or use sim cards, like RVRC did). Then broadcasting it to students to let them know it is live! (and maybe farm some CS aura in the process)

We're also looking at the possibility of being able to tell if clothes are done but not removed yet. (This is another heavily demanded user story).