The purpose now is to display the status of the washing machine and dryer on my domotica app.
The signal can be connected to the GPIO port of the raspberry Pi that is almost next to it (now just control the heating and ventilation of the house)
Status to be displayed off/running/ready on my custom frontpage runing on an other Rasberry Pi
- Off would be when there is no power on the unit
- Running would be when there is power
- Finished would be when the LED with the finised status is on
First I started with taking the dryer apart to figure out who the LED's were controlled, since this unit is light weight and hardly used in summertime.

The LED's are controlled by a darlington array on one side and a transistor on the other side, making them actually blink at ~10MHz (CPU run at 20MHz)
so this has to be tapped of, keeping the LED's working as normal and stabilizing the signal so the pi get's a continues signal and not the high frequency switching of the LED.
I have been thinking about using the flashport and hook this up to the SPI port of a raspberry pi, but that seems a lot more work than just reading the LED status.

I slodered wires to the power connection and the signal for the finished LED

then I hooked the wiring up to a circuit that would switch the GPIO ports using a optocoupler (to keep the units electrically separated)

and on the second side connected the pi

i installed a small box on the back of the dryer to install the electronics in

then I tested the circuit and finetuned the capacitor and resistor values to get a stable output signal on the second side of the opto couplers

and figures out how the LED's were controllerd in the washing machine to hook them up to the box on the back of the dryer

when both units worked at the test setup, i made a small board to go into the box on the back of the dryer instead of the test board



finally i hooked the signals up to my pi i'm using for my heating and ventilation control and added the idx to my custom frontpage
I use a python script that runs every 30 seconds and checks the status of the GPIO pins and compares them to the status in domoticz, if not equal, it changes the status in domoticz otherwise it sleeps again 30 seconds (using wiringpi2 library)
I put a lot more details in a few slides for the once who are interested in more about this project.
home.kpn.nl/fwiegers1995/doc/washing ma ... moticz.pdf
time to start a new project!