The Dryer Update…

[Any Amazon Links below are Non-Affiliate Links that just go to Amazon Smile]

So, if you think back a bit, you may recall that I was using a Pi 4 for my IoT project that monitored the dryer, shooting out Telegram group messages to the whole family when the dryer was done with the laundry.

Times being what they are, it’s pretty difficult to come by a new Raspberry Pi these days, as I’m sure many of you know. I needed the power of the Pi 4 for something else, at least on a temporary basis. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a couple of months prior, I’d received a ping from the Micro Center about 45 minutes away informing me that they had a handful of Pi Zero 2 W’s on hand. Those little suckers are super hard to find, so I snapped up my max of 2, along with the GPU I’d been dying to lay hands on for the longest time. For those who care, I finally got an EVGA 3080. Pandemics and supply-chain constraint conditions suck, by the way, in case you were wondering my position on that issue.

So, having my Pi Zero 2 W in the drawer ready to roll, I unscrewed the box from the way that housed the Pi 4, fitted the sensor I had directly onto the Pi Zero 2 W, and scaled down from a 2-project-box solution down to 1 box. Sadly, it sucked. But, it wasn’t the hardware’s fault. In reality it was totally a self-inflicted condition.

I modified (slightly) the pins on the old 801s sensor I had, fitted it onto that new Pi Zero 2W (since it didn’t have any GPIO pin headers soldered on), and sort of Rube-Goldberged it together using 3M VHB tape inside the project box. Total hack job. I thought about using a bunch of hot glue, but then I thought better of it. Why not solder? Honestly? I suck at soldering. One of these days I’ll get around to getting good at it. But that’s not today.

It was wildly unstable. The sensor kept on moving, losing contact with the side of the GPIO holes, it was awful. I all but gave up. I had a brief flirtation with the Aqara Smart Hub and one of their Zigbee Vibration sensors, and believe me, when I say brief, I mean like 12 hours. It just wasn’t fit for the job.

My grand plan with that was to mimic what I was doing over on the washer – write some Python code and run it in a container to query an API somewhere in the cloud every X seconds to see if the thing was vibrating or not, then based on that, work out the state of the dryer to determine if the dryer had started or stopped and then act accordingly. But alas, since step 2 in this plan was a klunker, steps 3 through infinity? Yeah, those never happened.

So, back to the drawing board. I found that I couldn’t easily lay hands on a new 801s again, and the project for the Pi4 was now finished, so I had that back. I did find a new vibe sensor – the SW-420. 3 pins instead of 4, but it’s still a digital output that works fine with the Pi, and my existing code worked as-is, so who cares, right? Yeah, I classed the thing up quite a bit more this time too. This time, instead of shoving the Pi inside a project box that’s mounted on the wall running from the SD card, I opted to run in one of those snazzy Argon One M.2 SSD cases booting Ubuntu 22.04 from an M.2 SSD in the basement of the case. I’ve got that sitting on a lovely little shelf mounted just above and behind the dryer, with my 3 GPIO leads running out of the top of the case, directly into the small project box that’s attached to the front of the dryer, inside which is the sensor, which is stuck to the inside of the box using 3M VHB tape. The box itself is stuck to the dryer using VHB tape as well.

In the end, all’s well that ends well. I’ve had to do a good bit more tuning on the SW-420 sensor. It’s been a bit more fiddly than the old 801s was. That one was definitely a plug and play affair. This has required a bit of adjustment on the little potentiometer that’s built into the sensor. Not too bad though. I’ve invested probably a total of 15 minutes of time standing next to the dryer, staring at telemetry, while the dryer is running, or not. But in the end, it’s all working, and the notifications are happening once again.