10 ms·
Is It Dry Yet?
- badgerbbbadger 2y agoI got tired of my dryer being dumb.
- 0x457 2y agoThey do sell dryers and washers that can notify you. HN crowd probably doesn't like those because "OMG why does it need internet?". They don't even cost that much compared to ones that aren't connected.
- badgerbbbadger 2y agoWe did look into such dryers as well but my girlfriend and I wanted to use our ecocheques and we also wanted a cheap dryer that just got the job done. The nearest smart dryer was at least a 100 euros more expensive. And it ended up being a fun project for me ^.^
- rrauenza 2y agoI wonder if you could have done it like a motion sensor scheme. If you consume 100watts, reset a countdown timer. So as home assistant polls the outlet, it should keep resetting the timer. If the timer expires, then notify that the dryer is done.
- badgerbbbadger 2y agoThat might be a smarter way to do it! Right now I have this thing where if we don't unload the dryer it does a sort of warming cycle every 20 minutes or so. And that triggers another alert. We don't mind because that just means we _should_ unload the dryer to stop it from consuming more power. But I suppose the countdown approach would still trigger the same thing. I suppose if I didn't really want the extra alerts I should be monitoring the duration of power consumption and exclude the ones that are of a shorter duration. I might try the countdown approach for something different and see what results I get. Thanks for the idea!
- rrauenza 2y agoYou're welcome! I installed home assistant about a month ago and have been really liking it ... I was thinking of doing something similar to what you are dong but was trying to think of how to do it without the custom virtual device.
- eternityforest 2y agoDoes Home Assistant support Apprise notifications? For my automation system I have a box where you can enter an Apprise target, and get notified with the nfty.sh app. It's really nice because the channel name is the password, there's no API key or sign up needed. I like Zrok a lot for true remote access, it seems to do something similar to what tailscale is doing there, but it's powered by some decentralized tech that seems to leave open the possibility of having the tunnel endpoint in a phone app so it still works on isolated LANs. Of course this is all theoretical, since in practice I keep my personal everyday practical tech a bit more off the shelf, I just put a YoLink vibration sensor on the dryer.
- switch007 2y agohttps://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/apprise/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/apprise/ seems so
- CraftThatBlock 2y agoYes, it has an integration for Apprise. You can also just use the Home Assistant mobile app to receive notifications on your device.
- bfdm 2y agoHah, facing a similar gripe so enjoyed this. Unfortunately/thankfully the dryer is on its last legs too, so will likely be replaced by the smart washer sibling unit later this year.
- apercu 2y agoMy experience with "smart" driers is maybe less positive than others. Seems they typically only have one sensor in a rotating drum, if they "read" a t-shirt they will stop because it's "dry". But your jeans and your towel are not. Or, the sensors become intermittent, so you stop using the "smart" features.
- mhink 2y agoFor what it's worth, my understanding is that it's generally not recommended to wash/dry different kinds of fabric together.
- pstrateman 2y agoYes before drying my clothes I'm sure to blend them to a consistent mush.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoI would naively assume the sensor would be a hygrometer measuring the humidity of the outgoing air. What kind of dryer do you have?
- smilingsun 2y agoThe cool thing about water is that evaporates all by itself. For free even. No electricity is required. So an alternative to making the tumble dryer "smarter" can be to simply not use it for most of the time, thereby cutting the loss caused by "dumb" dryers. The engineering part that's missing is related to re-introducing and improving the many awesome laundry line systems that used to be available.
- smegger001 2y agoHanging clothes on a clothes line to dry only works you dont live somewhere with frequent rain
- dartos 2y agoOr very high ambient humidity (which I guess causes frequent rain)
- sroussey 2y agoI’ve been places where cotton never dries and becomes a fertile ground for all sorts of things.
- yorwba 2y agoIt works just fine indoors.
- big_man_ting 2y agoHow about you hang your clothes indoors when it's raining inside? I've been doing that for years in a rainy country in a tiny studio apartment. No issues.
- CalRobert 2y agoThis can cause issues with damp depending on your home and the local weather.
- kkfx 2y agoThis is a good example why I hate both 99% of IoT available on sale AND HA as well... Anything simple demand a wall of text, convoluted reasoning, absent or badly documented stuff and so on. This is a similar example JUST to get a water leak notification from a user-friendly device (by user friendly means no crappy proprietary protocols and services imposed, local as a first class usage etc) https://kfx.fr/posts/shellyfloodandha/ https://kfx.fr/posts/shellyfloodandha/ and just to use such automation to automatically close a motorized valve witch actually just provide 4 power wires (ground, phase on "close", phase on "open" and "neutral) is another wall of YAML. Essentially 99% of commercial IoT seems to be designed just to impress illiterate people with colors and so on, not much differently than older merchants on "savage peoples" selling colored glass like gold, and without any ideas about a real practical usage and integration of useful features. Personally about most kitchen appliance I cry for maximizing p.v. self-consumption, since it's the sole technically sound way to use p.v., for instance ovens, dishwasher, washing machines, dryers can be "left ready to run" for a significant amount of time, all we need to maximize self-consumption is coordinate their power usage: ovens start to consume for a certain amount of time, than just keep hot with short time heating, washing machines tend to heat one or two time maximum for a certain (variable) amount of time, dishwasher tend to heat more times, but all can delay a bit their power loads, if they offer a cheap ModBUS or a less cheap but not so expensive MQTT card AS AN OPTION to be plugged behind the machine or even a kind of "smart plug" that actually just a local powerline device communicating to the internal electronics, coordinate their run from HA would be simple. No one seems to have though about such usage. Water heaters? Similarly, even most modern heat pump water heaters take into account just delaying consumption looking at grid energy price, no real integration with p.v., cars? Even worse: 99% of BEV support DC direct charging, actually most p.v. inverters supporting a battery support 400V batteries, the very same voltage of most cars nowadays, so why the hell not offer a simple home charge socket DC-to-DC to avoid double conversion DC-AC-DC with significant loss in the process? AFAIK only one vendor do so, but NOT integrated with any P.V. they just use "fast charging" as a bidirection bridge to offer V2H for cars do not support such usage (like MOST cars on sale).
- cjk2 2y agoMeh I just leave my shit in the dryer when it's done.
- xandrius 2y agoThis seems exactly the same approach as the rice cooker post. Maybe inspired? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39902207
- firloop 2y agoYes, I had the same thought. Suspicious or coincidental.
- badgerbbbadger 2y agoCoincidental. Probably a case of this being one of the simpler solutions to implement. Convergent problem solving? (like how in evolution different species can converge on the same trait?)
- badgerbbbadger 2y agoIt wasn't inspired but thanks for the link! If I had known of the device notification integration, I would have just used that instead of trying to roll my own logic :D
- secabeen 2y agoYou also can take a lot of it out of the manual config by creating an input_select with various options to track the operational state of the dryer (Off, Drying, Finished), then use traditional automations to trigger switches between opstates and notifications based on opstate change. There are many threads on the HA forums and community about how to do this.
- bobchadwick 2y agoI roughly followed this approach: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/clothes-dryer-automations/149017/36 https://community.home-assistant.io/t/clothes-dryer-automati.... It worked surprisingly well, but the battery died in the sensor and I guess I didn't see enough value in getting the notifications so I never bothered changing it.
- culebron21 2y agoMechanical kitchen timer will suffice. You usually know the duration of most used programs. Doesn't need a hundred taps in the phone to get it working. Mental effort to set the timer is lower than with phone timer. You dial it and carry in a pocket. Zero distraction when you set it up or get notified -- you won't sink into the timer scrolling for half an hour. And in the end you'll get the notification.
- ziddoap 2y agoAlso not as fun or educational.
- badgerbbbadger 2y agoMainly this. The project taught me a lot, was a good way to have material to work further on my blogging skills and will hopefully lay a foundation for more interesting projects in the future.
- reyostallenberg 2y agoWorking, but so boring. For some of us it's nice to build needles stuff instead of using a better (but boring) solution ;) I like the needles stuff, you like the mechanical 'easy' solution
- msrenee 2y agoI was wondering what was going on in their life that the alert sound from the washer and dryer weren't sufficient for the purpose. My GE dryer sings a happy "laundry's dry" song when it's finished. You're right though, this way is more fun.
- calfuris 2y agoLaundry machines are not always positioned where they will be easily heard.
- culebron21 2y ago
- mbil 2y agoHah, this reminds me of one of the first programs I wrote for personal use. My Macbook at the time had an accelerometer or gyro of some kind. So I made a program to monitor the output from that sensor, and it would send me an email when the motion stopped. I'd run the program, set the laptop on top of my running dryer, and go upstairs. In retrospect it was probably not smart to leave a laptop on top of the dryer for an hour :)
- badgerbbbadger 2y agoThis is one of the most bodgy things I've come across and I love it! Did you end up replacing it with something else?
- mbil 2y agoEnded up just replacing it with a timer, which was good enough. The main reason was that I wanted to use my computer while the laundry was drying.
- rzzzt 2y agoSudden motion sensor for detecting klonks from eg. a fall so the HDD can put the heads somewhere safer. It was also used to generate lightsaber sounds: https://youtu.be/phcXNisiD8w https://youtu.be/phcXNisiD8w
- Scoundreller 2y agoMake an app that does this and people can tape their old cell phone to it and report. Could just work with sound if no accelerometer/gyro.
- YawnNews 2y ago[flagged]
- marcinzm 2y agoI did something similar except I used a vibration sensor since we have shared laundry for the floor. When doing laundry we take the sensor and then stick it, using the magnets glued to the back, onto the dryer/washer. The distance drops the signal strength of the sensor which is what tells the automation that clothes washing/drying is in progress. Once vibration has stopped it knows that the laundry is done. Alexa then loudly notifies us of it (great fun if it happens in the middle of an interview) and the e-paper display in the living room shows an alert so we don't forget.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoIs that a product you bought or something you made yourself? I've been wanting something like that but haven't figured out how to get it
- marcinzm 2y agoI used a YoLink vibration sensor. The lack of a local mode for YoLink is a big negative but there's also Zigbee vibrations sensors. The positive is that in my experience YoLink has been very reliable across the board while Zigbee has been hit or miss. Also unlike other cloud based services (ie: Kasa for example) they provide a MQTT integration so there's very low latency.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoThanks; I actually do prefer zigbee, but that tells me what I'm looking for
- pengaru 2y agosmart, you could probably do the same thing with a cheap piezoelectric microphone / transducer (actually I wouldn't be surprised if a vibration sensor is basically just that) plugged into an audio line-in port on an RPi running the show.
- jchw 2y agoI've wanted to do this sort of thing for a while, but I am a bit concerned about using many of the smart plugs on the market with large motors, and I assume most dryers contain a fairly large electric motor (not sure how large.) I'm in the midwest U.S., so my dryer is a gas dryer; so presumably, the only real thing being driven off the electricity is indeed a micro-controller and a fairly large motor of some kind. I can find very few smart plugs that specifically advertise the ability to handle inductive loads, which makes a ton of sense of course, since I think that winds up needing relatively expensive MOSFETs and circuit design more advanced than I can really understand to be robust. I think the best recommendation I've seen is to simply not use smart plugs for inductive loads at all, and instead use other methods to either measure current or implement switching. I'm a bit afraid to use most any of these smart plugs. I have a couple Zigbee ones that seem to work fine but I am only trusting them with relatively small resistive loads for now since it feels dicey to put anything serious on them.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago> and instead use other methods to either measure current or implement switching. Yeah, I keep meaning to look at clamp style measurement. That doesn't give you control, of course, but I'm mostly interested in finding out how much power larger appliances are actually using (my dryer is pure electric).
- chongli 2y agoA current clamp meter will not tell you anything unless you break out the individual wires you want to measure. Having both live and neutral running through the clamp will cause the electric field of the neutral to cancel out the field of the live whenever the device draws current, so the meter will be unable to read anything.
- jchw 2y agoThis isn't too big of a deal since at least around here, appliances tend to be wired with screw terminals. So, in a lot of cases there actually is a separate place to measure hot and neutral without any terrible hacks. (Not sure if that applies to my dryer, though: I should check.)
- amelius 2y agoI love the enormous artistic effort the author put in the images.
- seeknotfind 2y agoAll 3.8MB of the cover image are appreciated by me :)
- BugsJustFindMe 2y agoThere are two cover images on the page, for 8.3MB total. It's pretty wild.
- badgerbbbadger 2y agoHeya! Thanks for pointing this out. I've loaded these pages so often (and mostly from local) and lost sight of the terribly large images. I've compressed both of them for a smoother experience.
- zamadatix 2y agoIs it not just the output of some "laundry room in the style of Van Gogh" prompt? Looks great, just not sure that's an indication of effort these days. Several non-sensical sections aren't cleaned up for example.
- dylan604 2y agoI really like the fact that the inside of the dryer is deeper than the housing of the unit itself. If we're going magical, let's just go full on magician's hat, Felix's bag of trix (or Harry Potter for those too young for Felix).
- williamcotton 2y agoWould you be as salty if it was free clipart or stock photos?
- lowbloodsugar 2y agoWe decided to buy fancy WiFi washer and dryer for our new house. Apparently to meet the latest bullshit energy requirements, our dryer does so by not completely drying things. So now I put it on timed dry, and that means I can just start a 60 minute timer on my watch.
- valicord 2y agoNot to knock other people's hobbies, but our dryer plays a loud jingle when done, no Internet connection required. Do other models not have this feature?
- fragmede 2y agoHow loud is that jingle, and how small is your house? for some, the dryer is located in a basement, far away enough that no such jingle, or buzzer can be heard in the rest of the house.
- smugglerFlynn 2y agoSolution is quite simple - rewire the dryer's jingle circuit to electrically trigger play for a pre-recorded "Hey Alexa! Notify my owner that drying is complete" cassette record on an old portable Walkman. Install Amazon speaker nearby to react on this.
- valicord 2y agoFairly loud and fairly large (can be heard on another floor), but I'll admit I didn't consider the basement scenario (since I don't have one)
- astura 2y agoMost do, but basements and garages are a common location for dryers, both are usually out of the way enough that it's very difficult to hear the sound in the living quarters.
- gavinsyancey 2y agoThis is a common feature, but somehow mine does not do this. I didn't pick it out; my landlord did. Not surprised they cheaped out on literally everything.
- dfc 2y agoThe thing that I am not sure of is why it's so important to know when the dryer finishes? And if it's that important how does it slip your mind that the 45 dryer cycle started at the top of the hour? Is it a kids thing?
- andrewfromx 2y agodefinitely thought this was about code and "don't repeat yourself". I thought it was going to talk about how it's not necessary to make sure your code is 100% dry it's ok to repeat yourself sometimes. Which it is. Specially while waiting your clothes to dry.
- NortySpock 2y agoFor those wanting this convenience on a dumb washing machine, I used a single smart plug flashed with Tasmota firmware to monitor when the power draw dropped to zero. Notifications through Home Assistant. Not affiliated, just a happy customer of: https://cloudfree.shop/product/cloudfree-smart-plug-runs-tasmota/ https://cloudfree.shop/product/cloudfree-smart-plug-runs-tas...
- thechao 2y agoCloudFree is great, but I wish I'd been able to pitch the name 'clearsky' to them. I hate, I do mean loathe, all of these cloudy smart things. So... I'm pretty pleased you posted this. Now, I just gotta figure out what the heck "Tasmota" is.
- mewse-hn 2y agoMy experience was Tasmota: I won some smart plugs at a work event, and I'm not a smart home guy so I brought them home and figured out how to set them up. They required a vendor specific smartphone app. I was less than impressed. I wouldn't be able to set up any automations because this thing had to dial home to some shitty vendor cloud lock-in thing. I looked into how to load open firmware onto the smart switches, and I discovered I'd basically have to destroy the plastic shell of the device to get access to the circuit board, desolder the wifi control module and solder in a new module that was compatible with Tasmota, which is the standard open source firmware for these devices. What was much easier was to buy Sonoff S31 smart switches because they are able to be disassembled without cutting and grinding the shell away. Then I reprogrammed them using a 3d printed clip with pogo pins - flashing the Tasmota firmware so that I could do whatever I wanted with them. Easier still would be to buy smart plugs with Tasmota pre-flashed.
- deadbunny 2y agoFor the UK folks I've bought some pre-flashes plugs from https://www.mylocalbytes.com/ https://www.mylocalbytes.com/ and been happy.
- birdman3131 2y agoNow I understand using HA if you are trying to keep it all off the internet but this is all doable in the shelly app itself. May be a better way of doing it but off hand you can do it with 2 scenes. Scene 1. If power consumption > 100w for 5 minutes turn scene 2 on. Scene 2. If power draw less than 5w for more than a minute. send notification to phone. Turn off scene 2.
- time0ut 2y agoCool hack and enjoyable read. The smart plug idea is slick. I like the idea of decoupling the smart from the appliance. I'd much rather all my appliances be dumb. In the US, you'd have to get a 240 volt smart plug. Are there any reputable ones? For the laundry use case, I just set an alarm on my phone though...
- hunter2_ 2y ago> In the US, you'd have to get a 240 volt smart plug For the 75% that use electric. 25% use gas with 120V motor/control.
- JohnTheNerd 2y agoIf you are scared of messing with electricity like I am, instead of using power monitoring, another viable but less reliable option is to use vibration sensors. I picked up a simple Zigbee vibration sensor for less than 20$, taped it on top of the washer/dryer, and connected it to HomeAssistant using Zigbee2MQTT. After creating two automations to detect start/stop based on continuous vibrations over a few minutes, I had the notifications working the exact same way.
- hinkley 2y agoI don’t know about economical but there are devices that sense current flow in a line without a tap, just from the EM fields. People with wood shops use these to automatically turn on the dust collection system when any power tool is turned on. Between small production sizes and the relay there are probably cheaper DIY solutions. OP is just using a smart plug, so no real electronics involved.
- gambiting 2y agoThe problem with those is that they only work if they are wrapped around a live wire, not live and neutral. So unless you have exposed L/N wires in your cable, it's not going to work at all.
- Scoundreller 2y agoThese clamp on systems may not work too well on North American 240V circuits like a dryer since the emf will cancel, no? You have two 120V feeds exactly 180 degrees out of phase with eachother. Unless you unravel the wires a bit and just clamp a single conductor. Or maybe I have this all wrong.
- jtriangle 2y agoYou are correct, current clamps can't read accurately in this situation. All you'll get is any disparity between the phases, which, will be small. That said, it's probably worth a try, because it's likely that internally the drier's control circuits are only tapping one leg, and you might be able to read that, and it might change reliably enough to trigger an alert. Usually, you'd use a vibration sensor for this job however. You can also use a thermal sensor on the exhaust air, combined with a time delay (because they run cooldown/dewrinkle cycles), and you're good to go.
- throwitaway222 2y agoI'm just staring at the artwork (dalle I'm assuming?)