What sensors to detect door ring/status of washing machine?

Hardware Home Automation
1

Hello :slight_smile:

i’m looking for ideas on how to detect those 2 things:

  • the ringing of the door of my apartment
  • the status of my washing machine (i.e. a message, when my washing machine is done)

One important thing is, that I live in Germany and don’t want to deal with high shipping costs and customs, but I’ve not yet found sensors that I could use and buy in Germany. For the washing machine I thought about using a vibration sensor. Xiaomi has one, but I can’t find a store in Germany that sells this… Do you have any ideas how I could deal with those situations?

Thanks in advance!

2

I use these sensors:

  • ring of the door -> HOMEMATIC Klingelsensor
  • status of the washing machine -> SONOFF POW flashed with TASMOTA, sends the power consumption over MQTT

Frank

1 Like
3

Thank you for the suggestions!
I’ve never used IFTTT before but would this one work too for the washing mashine? https://www.amazon.de/Intelligente-Steckdose-Verbrauchsanzeige-Steuerung-Funktioniert/dp/B079D8Y2VW/ref=sr_1_6?__mk_de_DE=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&keywords=steckdose+verbrauch+smart&qid=1561121990&s=gateway&sr=8-6

As for the door ring. How hard is it to install something like this? I’m really bad with this whole eletric stuff. And is it even allowed to modify the built in “system” for the door bell in an apartment?

4

Yes I’m sure that this tiny cheap thing will work for you to see the status of the washing machine.
It uses it own app and connects to its cloud service which is located somewhere (Germany?, China?)

But it has nothing to do with Openhab

Frank

5

I’m using a Fritz!Dect 200 and a rule sending a message if no power is consumed for 10 minutes. Works without cloud.

1 Like
6

Yeah but can’t I use it with IFTTT? I don’t know how IFTTT works but that’s something I can connect to my openhab or not?

7

Hi,
I did place a webcam in front of the machine and hacked together a python script that uses opencv to find the lcd in the image.
further on, the the section of the lcd is compared with the most recent one and if the difference is ‘quite low’ it’s finished. This approach has some issues therefore I’m intending to ocr the image (I did some experiments and recently had some first successes with that) - but I currently have very little time to work on my home automation, therefore this will take a while.