Those of us who live and die by our gadgets continue to dream about the day that all the devices in our house will communicate in the ways we want them too. This, of course, is the promise of the "Internet of Things." Eventually all your gizmos—ranging from your coffee maker to your garage door—will be able to communicate with you, each other, and hopefully your remote management system of choice. The Internet of Things is a major goal in Silicon Valley right now, and one startup recently launched a hobbyist product to move things in the right direction.

The Electric Imp, for those not in the know, is a little SD card-sized Wi-Fi device that can be hooked up to various types of electronic sensors. It can then connect electronic devices or other real-world physical items to the Internet. For now, it remains very much in the hobbyist domain. But the Palo Alto company would eventually like all kinds of items—from mousetraps to light switches—to become “imp-capable.”

The people behind the Electric Imp are at the forefront, and they have an alpha release devkit you can experiment with. We received one last month and considered hacking a coffee machine or even building a gumball machine that would dispense treats every time one of my articles got re-tweeted 100 times. But the coffee machine idea had been done and the gumballs seemed just a bit over the top. So a month ago we asked our readers for some guidance on what to do with our Electric Imp device.

There were a number of great ideas: automated door locks, monitoring a refrigerator and freezer, automatically raising and lowering blinds to minimize energy costs, etc. My electrical engineer partner-in-crime, Malcolm Knapp, even made a tag cloud of the collection of comments we got.

In the end, we decided we needed something both technically challenging, useful, and feasible. In that light, we settled on one of our original ideas—a washing machine that would text when it's done.

Why the washing machine?

The washing machine was originally proposed by Hugo Fiennes, Electric Imp’s CEO, when I first interviewed him this summer. Sure, some people dismissed this idea as not terribly useful. Ars reader xFriarx, for example, wrote: “Most washers already beep at you to let you know they are done. Besides, if you're not home, do you really care if your laundry is done? Are you really going to go home just to switch it over or are you that bad at time management and can't plan ~30 to 45 mins ahead to know you need to go home to switch the load over?”

It's true that Malcolm’s house isn’t terribly big, and yes, his machine already has a digital readout on the front. It also makes a sound when it’s done. But that noise only happens once; it’s easy to miss (and forget about). And I live in an apartment building in Oakland with about 30 units; my laundry machine is way down the hall. Yes, I realize I don't own the washing machine, but I might be able to sneak a duct taped-Electric Imp dev kit—what the company calls an “impee,” or in this case, specifically, a “Hannah”—onto the side or back of a machine. (One more bit of Electric Imp jargon: the “imp” refers to the SD-card sized Wi-Fi device itself.) Plus, my machine doesn’t have a timer on it, so I don’t actually know how long it takes.

Ultimately, I wanted something I would actually use. Given that we had unadulterated access to Malcolm’s washing machine, it felt like a good place to start. Plus, this idea has no related costs and didn’t require any crazy extra hardware. Hacking his door lock to close automatically, for example, would have been much more difficult. Really, we wanted a way to explore just how easy or difficult using an imp would be. Plus, we got a bunch of laundry done—you know, in the name of hacking and journalism!



How to wash your own laundry (imp-style)

When we got started, the concept of using the Hannah’s accelerometer to sense movement and send a text message when the movement stopped seemed straightforward. But, as is always the case, reality was a bit more complicated. The entire process took something on the order of 12 hours. That's a long time, much of it spent fiddling with code, testing, testing, and testing again—we did a lot of laundry.

In the end, what I learned was that this type of device is still very much in the hobbyist domain. It also requires extensive knowledge of programming. That was the most frustrating aspect about the entire experience—without Malcolm at my side doing most of the coding and iterating, I probably would have given up early.

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