Maria and Albert’s Laundry Pocket : New Textiles 2011

Have you ever run out of quarters while doing your laundry? With our laundry pocket, a green light will tell you if you have enough quarters for your next load.

Maria and Albert's Laundry Pocket

Our initial design concept was a bit more complicated. We wanted to leverage the power of the Arduino platform to dynamically and precisely change up to four outputs connected to our printed circuit board. Nothing struck the imagination more than a music mash-up like the one below:

Greeting Card Music Mash-Up

Unfortunately, our electronics skills weren’t quite good enough to figure out how to connect and more importantly power-up our musical outputs and so we had to go back to the drawing board for something a bit simpler.

What we opted for instead was to a simple laundry pocket, powered by a PCB that flashed an LED red every 0.1 second when the circuit was closed — in this case, when the button was closed. However, if there were enough quarters in the pocket and the connection was complete, that red LED would turn off and be replaced by a green LED that flashed every 0.1 second.

You can see a video demo of it here: Maria and Albert’s Laundry Pocket

The Arduino code is as follows:
const int buttonPin = 2;
int buttonState = 0;

void setup() {
pinMode(4, OUTPUT);
pinMode(3, OUTPUT);
pinMode(buttonPin, INPUT);

digitalWrite(buttonPin, HIGH);
}
void loop(){

buttonState = digitalRead(buttonPin);
if (buttonState == LOW) {

digitalWrite(4, HIGH);
delay(100);
digitalWrite(4, LOW);
delay(100);

digitalWrite(3, LOW);

} else {

digitalWrite(3, HIGH);
delay(100);
digitalWrite(3, LOW);
delay(100);

digitalWrite(4, LOW);

}
}

More pictures of our process are below — ENJOY!!!