Raspberry Shake: IoT for your boring appliances

My latest project (now I have some spare time again!) has been something quite simple – I’m terrible at putting the washing machine on, and then forgetting about it for the rest of the day, leaving a load of wet clothes inside to fester for hours on end. I know some washers and dryers come with alarms that beep at you when they’re finished, and I wanted to emulate this with an Internet of Things vibe.

So I came up with the Raspberry Shake – quite simply it’s an accelerometer connected up to a Raspberry Pi Zero with some LEDs to indicate status, all shoved inside a small box with some magnets attached, so it can cling to the side of any appliance. The Pi Zero runs a bit of Python code that checks for any movement, and sends notifications when the appliance starts and stops. I’ve made two so far, with plans for a third, and they’re working great!

You can see a full writeup and a video of the build on the Raspberry Shake project page