It's actually really, really easy to get the state of a "dumb" washing machine (or any other electric machine) into Home Assistant using a smart plug. You can use something really basic like "power draw for > n seconds followed by no power for > m seconds" to detect when a cycle is finished. You can get way fancier and look at power draw curves to determine what part of a cycle it's in, or which cycle, if you really want to. You can add a door sensor (recommend Samsung) if you want to know if the door's been opened.
Unfortunately it's much harder to do the same for an electric dryer, since there's no inexpensive or good smart plugs for 240V last I checked.
For the dryer think even simpler: get a Esp32 with a SW-420 vibration sensor, stick it on top of the machine somewhere, and look for vibrations. Since most dryers don’t have cycles, it’s really easy to detect if they’re running or not. There’s even a potentiometer on the SW-420 so you can adjust the sensitivity without reprogramming the ESP32.
This is (largely) what I have for my "dumb" washer. What makes mine unique is the washer is in my apartment building's cellar, too far for Wifi. So I have a LoRa transmitter that routes the message to a LoRa receiver on my home network.
Unfortunately, as you noted, I haven't figured out how to handle the dryer as the load is too much for all the smart plugs I've found. I wish there was a clamp-style monitor on an extension cord, but it seems that is something which doesn't exist.
Thankfully, the dryer isn't as much of an issue since dry clothes can sit there until I remember to get them.
I wonder if it would be practical to McGyver a solution into place by coiling some wire around / next to the dryer's power cable - to detect flowing current - and connecting the coil to an Arduino / Raspberry Pi
My understanding is that detecting an electrical current through a power cord typically doesn't work when measuring all the wires together, because the current in the live wire is canceled out by the return current in the neutral wire. This is why clamp-style meters are usually put at the electrical panel, where individual wires are accessible. Since I live in an apartment, that isn't an option for me.
It's also possible that your machine lets off some elecromagnetic noise you can detect directly.
The other thing you could try is put some sort of a microphone / vibration on it, then train a small NN on the waveform to distinguish between the washer and dryer.
I considered that, but the washer and dryer are stacked (limited space) so the vibrations of the washer would be picked up in a dryer vibration sensor.
Is that really a problem though? If you're washing another load at the same time as the dryer is running, wouldn't you generally want to wait until both are done anyways so you can swap the wash to the dryer after getting the dry load out?
Also at least in my experience the dryer takes longer to run than the washer, so if I've just rotated a previous load and started both at the same time I'm always waiting on the dryer to be able to do the next one.
Not always. I only put sheets and towels in the dryer, everything else gets hung up. So I may do two or even three washing loads in the time of a single dryer load (it can be very slow). So I'm much more interested in when the washer finishes than the dryer.
You might be able to set something up using a current clamp connected to an esp32, though it might have to go over a point where the wires are separated so possibly inside the machine. Might not be too hard depending on how you feel about opening up your dryer.
I know nothing about US 240V power circuits — what plugs do you use, could you get by with a Euro system?
I use Eve Energy smart plugs, which seems to be supported in Home Assistant through the matter integration. Local first, no bullshit remote account requirements, good quality, around 40€ / USD 45.
> I believe that US 240V is 2 hots, neutral, and ground.
Correct. Its called split phase, a 240V transformer is center tapped and that tap is grounded to create the neutral. Either end of the transformer to neutral is 120v and end to end is 240V.
> EU 400V (380V) is 3 hots, neutral and ground.
Three phase 230/400: 400V is line (hot) to line with 230V line to neutral. More for industrial use but I hear some homes can have this service for whatever reason.
> None of this is cross-compatible.
Not really. A 230/400 volt system also supplies 230v single phase. A 230 volt European device will work fine on 240V split phase unless it has a motor which will run faster on 60 Hz which could overload it. Though I have a machine with a three phase 380 volt 50 Hz motor running happily on 230/400 60 Hz from an autotransformer supplied by 120/208 60 Hz. Just runs 20% faster.
> Three phase 230/400: 400V is line (hot) to line with 230V line to neutral. More for industrial use but I hear some homes can have this service for whatever reason.
It varies from country to country in Europe. In the UK you'll almost never find 3-phase in a home, in Sweden even apartments usually have 3-phase supply. In my Swedish apartment the only thing connected to more than one phase is the induction hob.
Extra credit for discerning washer vs dryer, recognizing "done" buzzer/bell, etc. Might be useful if your dryer has a "wrinkle guard" feature; buzz and then keep tumbling on low heat.
For the washer, you could probably also discern portion of the cycle (fill, agitate, spin, drain).
I do this for my washing machine, drier, dishwasher and also 3D printer, in the UK. Have some Z-Wave Greenwave PowerNodes, hooked into Home Assistant. Works great. I also have Alexa hooked into Home Assistant so I was able to make it announce through our Echo Dot when a cycle for any of those devices completes.
I use an AI agent running on an old Android phone to monitor the position of the switch with the camera and let me know when it's straight up and down or side to side, since those are the four off positions of my knob. (kidding but maybe not by this weekend)
While VAC is indeed far from competent at detecting all but the most rudimentary cheats, it is so by design. When the first third party CSGO matchmaking/league services decided to use kernel level AC, Valve publically said they would personally not do such a thing. I can't remember if any exact reasons were named at the time, but I do think it's a fair take on their end. It's not like they're locking developers into using VAC anyway.
Furthermore, more recently they have debuted VACNet, which uses machine learning, most likely to recognize certain patterns and behaviors associated with cheating. Probably still avoidable if one were to use subtle settings and knows how to act properly. But it shows they haven't given up and are trying to explore alternative methods at least. I'm admittedly not familiar with how successful it has been as I have not been playing or even following the game for a long time.
"VAC bans are permanent, non-negotiable, and cannot be removed by Steam Support. If a VAC ban is determined to have been issued incorrectly it will automatically be removed." [0]
False bans cannot be appealed. They do happen. [1] You have no power to deal with them when they happen, and they really, really do happen. [2] You don't just get a game or server ban, you lose pretty much everything, and it becomes a public permanent record. Unless you're part of a headline, you have zero chance of reversal.
Most anti-cheats will immediately kick/ban someone from a game if it detects certain applications or hooks. Good for removing cheaters, but that gives cheat devs immediate feedback that something in their cheat has triggered it – they'll modify the cheat, try again, then see if it's detected or not.
VAC is designed around obscurity. When it detects a cheat it flags the account, and then an indeterminate amount of time later it/Valve bans all the flagged accounts. It makes it much harder for cheat devs to figure out what exactly flagged VAC, but the lack of an immediate ban means that normal players are still putting up with cheaters day in day out.
Another caveat is that VAC only bans you from the game engine. So you could get VAC banned from Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source, yet still be free to hack on Counter-Strike 2.
Also considering how many of Valve's titles are free, there's no wonder why hacks are so prolific in their games.
I played on a fantastic MUD as a kid. It was based on the code for some other MUD, and the admins were unhappy about some things, so they decided to write their own MUD engine from scratch. They got as far as establishing a network connection to a client - all network code written in scratch from C - before they burned themselves out and quit, which pretty much killed the MUD too.
There’s a lot to learn here. Many developers fall into this trap halfway through their careers. Spolsky would probably call these folks you’re talking about architect astronauts.
As someone who has (for several years) developed, supported, and operated my own dialect of a multiplayer game server engine (which includes an embedded physics engine), that sounds absolutely brutal. It took several years before I saw my first user and it was after I thought my project was long dead. Then it started catching on. You probably won’t see results if you expect more than that.
Hopefully they gained some appreciation for how much work goes into these.
Even worse, some will simply arbitrarily silently truncate the password. But not everywhere! The sign up page might silently truncate and then the actual login page might not.
What happened to me once is that a long-time password of mine got truncated as the website lowered it's maximum password length, and the login page didn't truncate, so my full correct password suddenly stopped working. The pain.
Unfortunately, traditional pinsetters are well on their way out. All of the chains now use new models with strings that are much cheaper to operate. Non-chain bowling alleys with traditional pinsetters almost all get displaced by competition from chains and other issues.
The kingpin at the top of the food chain sold the metals to a refinery. There were many levels below him of catalytic converters being bought and sold before they got to the kingpin.
I've always only bought Taiyo Yuden media since ~2000. Every CD-R and DVD-R I still have that I've tried is still readable.
Taiyo Yuden at least used to be white labeled sometimes, so you'd just look up online what white-label media at Best Buy or CompUSA at the time was Taiyo Yuden.
I haven't burned a disc in probably close to a decade at this point though. SpiderOak is my backup.
I think I have a lifetime supply of TY media. I hardly ever use it. I don't even know if it is CD or DVD. I'd have to look. I wonder if there is a shelf life for the media before it is recorded.
I'm in the spinning rust camp. I use the ZFS filesystem which protects against bit rot and I usually migrate to larger drives every several years. And I have an off site mirror of my local storage. My only concern is what happens to it when I'm no longer able to manage it. I guess I need to leave instructions.
Unfortunately it's much harder to do the same for an electric dryer, since there's no inexpensive or good smart plugs for 240V last I checked.