Smart Laundry Monitor – Know Before You Go

Inspiration

We’ve all done the “laundry walk” - go all the way to the laundry room, only to find every washer and dryer running. In our building it gets worse during peak hours; sometimes you end up waiting 25–30 minutes for the washer plus ~1 hour for the dryer, so you’ve basically spent an hour just orbiting the laundry room. We’ve experienced this firsthand. Students have even talked about it on Channel 4 / local student coverage, which means it’s not just an individual complaint - it’s a pattern people are noticing. So we asked: why don’t we know machine status before we leave our room?

What it does

Smart Laundry Monitor – “Know Before You Go” shows, in real time, whether a washing machine or dryer is FREE or RUNNING. A small sensor on the machine detects if it’s actually running, sends that data to our backend, and our web app displays a simple list of machines in that laundry room with color states:

🟢 FREE → you can go now

🔴 RUNNING → don’t waste the trip (We can also show “last updated” and room/building names.)

How we built it

We attached an IMU (vibration) sensor to the machine to tell if the drum is really moving.
An ESP32 reads that sensor and decides: vibration above threshold = RUNNING, else = FREE.
The ESP32 publishes status over MQTT to our broker with the machine ID.
A backend service subscribes to that topic, updates the current status in storage, and exposes an API.
A simple web frontend polls the API and shows the status for each machine in a clean, color-coded UI.
Everything is designed to be cheap and retrofittable - no need to buy smart washers.

Challenges we ran into

Inexperience with the required technologies

Accomplishments that we're proud of

-End-to-end IoT → MQTT → backend → web working for our own grad housing.

Did it with very low-cost hardware so it can scale.
Solved a problem we personally face (we’ve waited an hour, we know the pain).
Made it simple enough that any resident can open and see “is it free?”

What we learned

The problem was real because we lived it. Building for our own graduate housing made the requirements obvious - people don’t want fancy features, they want to know “is it free right now?”
Cheap retrofits are possible. We don’t need vendor smart machines - an IMU + ESP32 + MQTT works on existing washers.