During the fall semester 2019 at UC Berkeley, I was tasked to come up with an IoT project for my class ME100 – “Electronics for the Internet of Things”.
For this IoT project, I asked myself how I could implement “smart” functionality into my everyday life as simply and unobtrusively as possible. The result was Internet of Laundry: IoL.
IoL is a smart plug for communal laundry machines. It detects current flow and updates a website with machine status, and allows users to receive an email notification when a machine becomes free.
I cleaned out the inside of a commercial smart plug housing, and crammed an ESP32 microcontroller, current sensor, and RGB LED, all powered with an AC-DC 5V step-down into it.
I used AWS to host a Mosquitto MQTT broker, mySQL database, and Apache web server, and run Python scripts that moved data between the three. Javascript running on the client browser asynchronously pulls data from the database, and updates amperage readouts and animations on the web page.
