You know how everything strives to be smarter and smarter these days? Well, our regular home appliances are the same – moving in the general direction of the smartphone industry, although I would go out on a limb and say that smartphones evolve far more than your washing machine. After all, you don’t replace your washing machine once every two years, do you? Micha decided that his washing machine’s inaccurate timer is more of a burden than anything else, so he decided to roll up his sleeves and get down and dirty by tinkering with it. The reason he does so? His washing machine, like some of us, resides in the basement, and he just loathes checking up on it to know whether his clothes are done or not – hence the hacking of an “end of cycle” notifier that he calls his own.
The washing machine will feature an LED that lights up when it has finished the washing cycle, where it has been soldered in two wires and connected to Micha’s Arduino. The Arduino, on the other hand, is tethered into his home network over an Ethernet shield, so that he can monitor the process via a web browser – which is far more convenient than walking up and down the basement, don’t you think so? We look forward to see how Micha is going to “innovate” the rest of his home appliances…
Filed in . Read more about Arduino, DYI, Hacking, Mod and Washing Machine.