This ingenious Raspberry Pi project will ensure you never miss your laundry finishing

I don’t know about you, but I have a serious problem with keeping track of my laundry. I put the clothes in, set it off, and then go do something else for hours on end. I totally forget about it, and by the time I remember that I put the laundry on, all my clothes have been sitting around for hours and are cold and wrinkly. Fortunately, as is the tradition with SBC owners, if there’s a will, there’s a way…and if there’s a way, there’s an SBC for the job.

This Raspberry Pi project sends you a message when your laundry is done

On the Raspberry Pi subreddit, a user with the fitting name “funpicoprojects1” posted their idea. It’s a simple system that detects when the laundry cycle has finished and automatically sends a message over Telegram to inform its owner. However, there’s one problem; how do you build a system that detects when the cycle is finished?

This tinkerer’s idea was pretty smart. They set up a system to keep an ear out for the little jingle that their washing machine plays after finishing a cycle. As soon as it hears that, it sends the message over. Now they never have to worry about missing the end of their laundry.

People flocked to the thread to give their praise and share some really intelligent ideas as to how the creator can improve the system:

I applaud your work here. Can’t you just plug in a smart plug and detect when the voltage rises/then falls as the machine has stopped working

We use NFC tags on a timer for every cycle one for wash and one for dryer. Get notified when the timer goes off on our Alexa.

Now I just need a Raspberry Pi project that can iron my clothes for me. Until someone makes that, you can look at this project’s source code over on its GitHub page. And check out these other unconventional uses for a Raspberry Pi for some more ideas.