Washer or dryer not emptied? With a RasPi, a couple of smart sockets and some software, I’ll show you how you will never forget it.

Monitor home appliances with Fritzbox and Telegram Registration of DECT sockets Registration procedure Fritzbox Test message Thresholds Configuration files Systemd Service Unit Conclusion Article in Make Magazine 5 / 2020 read Regardless of whether you live for rent, in a condominium or in a single-family house, household appliances such as washing machines or dryers are often located outside the apartment in mezzanines, communal basements or laundry rooms. And even if not, the same problems still arise: You forget to take the laundry out of the machine and hang it up, to empty the dishwasher or you wait unnecessarily in front of the porthole of the washing machine until it has released the magnetic lock.

To get out of the way, I was looking for an inconspicuous solution without having to touch the building cabling, intervening in the electronics of the devices or, as with the laundry-ready detector, sticking sensors to the devices and annoying cable strips to have to move to the control module. My choice fell on the smart, DECT communicating sockets from the company AVM of the DECT model 200 in connection with a Raspberry Pi and my Fritzbox. I still had three of these sockets from a previous project.

The Raspberry Pi asks about the AVM Home Automation API the current power consumption of the devices connected to the sockets at the Fritzbox. If defined threshold values ​​are exceeded or not reached, it sends a message to a telegram group on behalf of the respective socket. The project software is written in Python and uses a library to communicate with the Fritzbox. In order to keep the program code as simple as possible, I deliberately do not use any of the existing libraries for sending the Telegram messages.

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