“My washer and dryer are two appliances that I’ve wanted to make “smart” for a long time, or at least smart enough to balance out how dumb I am about remembering to empty them when loads are finished. On several occasions, wet clothing has lingered in my washing machine for days. I’m not good at adult human life.
After I graduated from Arduino to ESP8266, my first project last year was also my most complex to date: detecting when a washer or dryer cycle has finished and sending a notification to my phone. Other people have had this idea, and by no means am I saying that this approach is the best, but it’s the first one I tried, and it’s worked wonderfully for me.
Now that I’ve got a few more projects under my belt, I felt like taking another swing at the laundry spy, so I’m documenting the process for revision 2. This is part one of another tedious multi‐part series!”