Category: python

Washerbot, the Next Gen of Washer Monitoring

Ok, so I built plugmon a while ago. It worked great. I loved it – super reliable, none of the fiddly nonsense I’ve had to work through with my vibration sensor-based dryer monitoring solution even. Sadly, the Etekcity smart plugs I used before, which used the (really nice) VeSync API no longer seem to be able to be purchased, easily at least.

So, what to do? If the code is to be useful long-term, we’ll need to change the platform to something that’s actually able to be purchased. Without question there’s no shortage of smart plugs available. So, what are desirable features that I’m after when looking for a different platform?

Naturally, I’m after some sort of way to easily talk to the plugs to read data. Of course, it also (should at least) goes without saying that we need a plug that offers the ability to monitor power use, as well as exposing some sort of API to allow use to get at that data without using the vendor’s app directly.

There’s a ton of options out there, but eventually, I landed with the Kasa (formerly TP-Link) plugs. Why? Two things really pushed them over the top. First of course was remote API-style access to the plug’s power monitoring data. But with the Kasa plugs one didn’t even need to go outside the home LAN to capture the data.

At the end of things, I kept the majority of code from jcostom/plugmon, grabbed a few bits of code from other projects I’ve worked on, and in about 30 minutes, the Washerbot was born.

It’s a shame that the VeSync plugs are now so difficult (impossible?) to come by. The API was reasonably easy to work with, and they weren’t terribly expensive either. I’m hopeful that TP-Link / Kasa Smart will be around for longer. I really like the “no outside connectivity” needed part of the python-kasa module as well.

Some may point out that there was a brief dust-up a couple of years ago with TP-Link, when they announced their intention to stop allowing local access to their devices, and you’d be right to do so. Fortunately, TP-Link was smart enough to take the not-so-subtle hints from the community, and walked that change back.

Without further ado, head over to GitHub and check out the new Washerbot code & container. Obviously, you’ll need one of the TP-Link plugs that provides energy use stats, like the KP115.

A Journey To A Smarter Dryer

This one was much more difficult. A lot more difficult.

If you recall from my post about the washer, I was able to pull off some fairly useful stuff without a ton of effort. Read a smart plug’s API to see how much power the washer is using to figure out when it turned on, then wait for it to turn off again, then let the fam know that the washer finished, and go take action so that the laundry doesn’t sit around for days, get funky and need to get re-washed. This was of course pretty easy simply because we were able to rely on the fact that the 120V motor in the washer draws well under 15A, the top end of the smart plugs I’m using, the Etekcity ESW15.

Sadly, when we moved into our house, we had an electric dryer. We’ve got natural gas in the house. Heck, in the same room even for the furnace and water heater even. But, back when the last washer sprang a leak and we needed a new washer in a hurry, and unfortunately at the time it was going to be months to get the matching gas dryer back in stock, so we just punted and stuck with the electric model. Sadly, this means for us this means we can’t take the same approach we did with the washer, since nobody makes a smart plug that works on 240V AC 30A circuits.

Unwilling to settle for relying on setting timers with Alexa, having to remind the kids to set timers, or just plain forgetting to do it, I started Googling about, looking for ways to go about monitoring the dryer. Monitoring energy use is the natural fit. When the dryer is in use, it’s consuming loads of energy, and when the clothes are dry, the energy use falls right off. This really shouldn’t be that hard to figure out, right? Right? Sadly, it was.

My next move was to play around with a split core current transformer clamp, and build a circuit with a burden resistor, reading the thing with a microcontroller. I read about the whole process in a handful of places online and it didn’t seem to ridiculous to build the circuit, so I sourced the parts. I got a little breadboard, some jumper wires, the resistors, capacitors, and the CT sensor clamp, and a sacrificial extension cord, which I’d use for my proof of concept test. You see, the CT clamp goes around a single conductor, not the whole cable assembly, so I needed to modify the cable slightly. Relax, the real cable was one of those “flat, side-by-side” types, so it would only mean peeling them apart, not really cutting anything. Sadly, I never made it to that phase. During my POC phase, I was able to get readings back from the sensor, but they never made sense. I was using an ESP32 microcontroller with MicroPython, so maybe that’s related. Or maybe I had a bum CT clamp. Or something else was wrong. We’ll never know, since I gave up after several evenings of bashing my head against the desk.

Failing at the “point” solution of energy monitoring, I moved on to looking at whole-house power monitoring. Hey, if we can’t kill this fly with a newspaper, let’s try a missile, right? Sense landed at the top of the pile. It had the API I was after, though they sort of keep that on the DL. Not in love with that, since those sometimes disappear. If I’m going to drop a couple of hundred bucks on something to use the API for something, it better not just disappear on a whim someday. Plus, our panel is in my home office, recessed in the wall, and there’s not exactly a clean way to get the Sense WiFi antenna back out without it looking really weird. I could make it clean, but then there’d just be a random RP-SMA antenna sticking out of my wall. Interesting decor choice. Sure to be a selling point when we sell the house some day.

Which brings me to the vibration sensor. I was reading one day, still searching, and I came across Shmoopty, and my problems were (half) solved. Sure, I had a Pi Zero W already laying around and I could have just built exactly what he had done, but what’s the fun in that? Remember, I’m already invested. It’s overkill time. So, I ordered up a couple of those 801s vibration sensors and got to work. You know, it was surprisingly hard to get one that met my needs at the time. Why? Most of the 801s units out there are analog-only. Since I’m using a Raspberry Pi, I wanted a digital output, so I didn’t need to mess around with the need for extra ADC (Analog to Digital Conversion) circuitry, just to read a simple sensor. So, I had to order from AliExpress and wait the long wait for shipping from China.

After my sensors finally turned up, I worked out the arrangement of my project boxes and so forth in the laundry room. I landed on a wall-mounted box for the Pi with a 1m pair of wires connected to the sensor, with the sensor inside another small box, which is stuck to the top of the dryer using a little strip of 3M VHB tape. Shmoopty’s Python made it easy to figure out how to read the sensor, so I was happy to be able to draw my inspiration from that. His approach is to keep it small, run on a Pi Zero W, even make it renter-friendly, while mine is more of a “go big” approach – building a Docker container to run it inside of.

Well, at the end of it all, it shares a lot of common philosophy with the plugmon tool, in that it loops infinitely, looking for start and stop conditions. Instead of watching power consumption, it’s watching for the dryer to start vibrating a lot. When that starts an appreciable amount of time, the dryer is declared to be “on”. Once it transitions back to “off”, it fires an event that causes a Telegram message to get sent to the family group chat, again, much like when the washer finishes!

Well, if you’ve made it this far, you’re ready to go check it out. So, get going and get reading. Smarten up that laundry room, report back what you did, and how you did it!

The Robots are Speaking…

So many applications and processes involve notifications. As we begin to automate processes, it becomes increasingly important to know if tasks we’ve initiated succeeded or not. That’s where automated notifications come into play. In my case, often times, these take the form of chatbots that send messages to let me know that something happened, or that a process either succeeded or failed.

I’ve settled on Telegram as my platform of choice for this. What’s attractive about Telegram? It’s available for a wide variety of platforms – iOS/iPadOS, Android, macOS, Linux, Windows, there’s even a web client.

So, how does one create a bot? You have a conversation with the BotFather. BotFather is a Telegram bot that creates bots (how meta, right?) for you. The bot walks you through the whole process. When the process is complete, you’re given a token – this is a secret value that serves as the “keys” to the bot. Once you’re done this process, you’re almost ready to start using the bot in your automations. Next, you start having a chat with the bot, just like you would with another human. Send the /start command to the bot to start it up. Once you’ve done that, you want to figure out the chat_id for that chat. This is pretty straight forward to do, fortunately.

To get the chat_id value for a private chat with your bot, you visit this URL:

https://api.telegram.org/bot[your-bot-token]/getUpdates

Want to use the bot to notify multiple people? Create a Group Chat and add the bot to it. Send a message to the group and reload that URL up above. Check the updates for the Group Chat messages, and look for the chat_id for the Group Chat in there. How can you tell the difference between a regular chat with the bot vs a Group Chat that the bot belongs to? Easy. All chat_id values are 32-bit integers, but Group Chats ID values are negative, while individual chats are positive. Easy, right?

Ok, so you’ve got the Token, and a chat_id value. It’s time to put those bits to work. Here’s an example, in Python, using the python-telegram-bot module, which you can install using pip install python-telegram-bot.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import telegram

myToken = '123456789:ABC-123456-foobarbaz9876543210'
chatID = -123456789

bot = telegram.Bot(token=myToken)
bot.sendMessage(chat_id=chatID, text="Hello World!")

This is just one of many ways possible to send notifications. Find the one that works best for you and your workflows and go with it! If you want to take a shot at using Telegram, give their docs a read before you start.