Founded in 1999, Vectorform creates digital products and experiences for the world’s leading brands, with a focus on immersive technologies, mobile experiences, Internet of Things, smart homes, connected vehicles, and wearable technologies.

Life in modern society can be very busy, and it can be easy to forget that a load of laundry was started.

Our Rumble system keeps people aware of the wash status of their machines by integrating their washing machine into the Internet of Things and providing updates based on sensor readings from their washing machine.

Accelerometer sensors are devices that measure acceleration caused by movement. These sensors are attached to washing machines, and the vibrations of a wash cycle indicate the current status of a washing machine.

Using deep learning techniques, our Rumble sensors predict when a wash cycle is running, and when a wash cycle has ended. Once a cycle has been predicted to be over, the user will be notified via our web application.

Our deep learning solution to wash cycle prediction is generalizable, allowing the user to place their accelerometer sensors anywhere and in any orientation on their washing machines. The overarching goal of Rumble is to predict different cycles of a wash, and also to predict if a washing machine is malfunctioning.

To the right, you can see our Rumble sensor mounted on a miniature model washer. Our solution works for any appliance that moves and vibrates while operating, allowing our work to be duplicated across many devices.

The Rumble sensor uses Adafruit ESP32 as the main microcontroller, our neural net is implemented in C++. Readings from the Rumble are pushed to the server via MQTT, and stored in a MySQL database. The web app is implemented using HTML, CSS and the React.js extension Victory React for data visualization.