Blog ≫ 2015 ≫ Laundrino (DIY smart connected washing machine)
Done a little work on this today, while sitting in the playroom with the boys... I'm genuinely waiting for the washing machine to finish before we can go out, so this is a perfectly valid time to do these experiments...
The problem: I want to know when the washing machine has finished, how long it has to go, anything else I can find out about it remotely. I don't want to open it up, because I don't have the skills and that would stop it working. So...
The solution: Point a raspberry pi camera at it, take pictures of the display, try to read the display with some ocr software and return that to me wherever I am.
And it's not working out too badly!
UPDATE: Using SSOCR1 now instead of Tesseract, better results. And here are the live results, hopefully embedded here:
For a while I had a live update from my washing machine here. Long gone, sorry. Should be details elsewhere on the site as to how it all worked.
Here are my old instructions in case you wan to use Tesseract:
First I take the picture (it's in a dark room, but the washing machine has a lit up seven segment display:
Next make it black and white and invert it, hopefully easier to read:
Next distort the image a bit, overlay it on top of itself but displaced by a few pixels to hopefully join up the gaps between the segments:
Looks a bit blurrier but it's easier for tesseract ocr software to understand... that reads that as "003", three minutes until my washing is ready! Time to put it in the dryer and go out!
- Removed old unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~auerswal/ssocr/ link here.
raspberry pi: Credit card sized super cheap computer, awesome.