• Arduino,  Hardware

    Making my washing machine smarter – Part 3

    << Continuation of Part 2

    Let’s start assembling the board that will control the state of the washing machine cycle. Four things are needed: the microcontroller, its power supply (the microcontroller works at 3.3 volts, and the power adapter we’re using works at 5v), the door lock detector and the actuation over the “start washing cycle” button.

    As stated above, the ESP-01 needs 3.3 volts to work, a ground connection and needs to have pulled high (using a resistor, like a 10kohm one for example) the GPIO0 and GPIO2 pins in order to boot correctly. Apart from that, an output pin will actuate the start button and an input pin will detect the door lock state.

    The 3.3 volts power can be obtained using, for example, an LM317T, a famous classic voltage regulator that, using a couple of resistors allows us to get a specific voltage. Using one of the many online calculators, we can calculate which resistors we need. In my case, I used this one.

  • Arduino,  Hardware

    Making my washing machine smarter – Part 2

    << Continuation of part 1

    Guts. Time to talk about guts. Electronics guts of course…

    Which microcontroller should we use for this project? The first requirement is it hast to have WiFi, since it will be the way its way of sending notifications to my phone. About number of general purpose input/outputs (GPIO), two would be enough (one for detecting the door lock state and another one for actuating the cycle start button remotely). I could use a classic Arduino UNO, with a WiFi shield:

    This one is known by most makers out there. It supports thousands of libraries, which you can make tons of things with, but… It has like 20 pins between digital and analog, and even though the WiFi shield uses some of them, I still think it’s overkill for my project. Two pins would be enough.

  • Arduino,  Hardware

    Making my washing machine smarter – Part 1

    I like challenges, and I also like smart devices, what we usually call “gadgets.”

    What do I miss in my washing machine? Notifications to let me know when it is done washing my clothes. Yes, some models play a catchy little tune to make it clear that they are done, but not mine… Even if I had one of those singing washing machines… What if I’m listening to music with headphones? What if I am upstairs? Well I will have to be checking every little bit. Also, the washes are somewhat flexible in wash cycle duration (they do not have exactly X minute wash cycles, since depending on the clothes you are going to wash, it will be easier or more difficult to evacuate the water). I usually use the 60 minute wash cycle, unless the clothes are really very dirty, but the real time in my case is actually 63 minutes one day, maybe 75 the next…

    The victim

    Tired of this, I have decided to open my washing machine and figure out some way to detect when it ends, in order to launch a notification to my phone. And if I can make it possible to activate the wash cycle remotely at the same time, that would be even better (my poor low-cost washing machine does not even have the function of deferring the start of the washing cycle by X hours …).

  • Django,  HTML,  Python

    Django – Error in CreateView, the form does nothing, it does not save to the database

    Yay! New post…

    Yep, I came back to this, my abandoned blog, to tell you about how I solved an error I was having with Django and was driving me crazy for a some days…

    But first, Django? What is Django ?. Well, I am not going to go into much detail, but I will tell you that it is a web development framework that I discovered not so long ago, but I liked it a lot. Complete websites with great functionality are obtained with very little effort. It is based on python, which is a plus, since I recommend everyone to learn this programming language that is leading the list of favorite programming languages ​​🙂

    Among the building blocks of django, there are generic views, which are an easy way of creating listing, detail, edit, create and delete pages (among others) for entities in the database.

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