Sorting

I have been thinking in more detail about how to accomplish sorting into lights and darks prior to washing. My conclusions is to do something like the following:

The main shoot goes up to the master bedroom, as shown in the floorplan. It will then split into two smaller shoots, each one going to a washer/dryer. The problem here is that I need to be able to access the circuitry that does the sorting, so the split will have to happen as low as possible and still have the washer/dryers gravity fed. There will be a door in the shoot right above where the split happens, and when I open this door I will be able to access all the circuitry. I figure this means I will have pretty easy access to it--maybe need a stepladder, but that's not a big deal.

What is a big deal is what that circuitry will be. First, the mechanical side: I'm thinking there will be two sheets, probably plastic because it's not conductive and it's easy to machine. All the circuitry will be fastened to the lower sheet. The upper sheet will be clear and will be where the clothing falls.

Both sheets will be attached to one or two (probably two) motors that will turn one direction or the other to allow clothing to fall into one of the smaller branch shoots. (The drawing above is not to scale.) This way, when the sheets are level, the clothing will not move. When they are slanted to the right, it will fall into one of the subshoots, and when they are slanted to the left, it will fall into the other.

The difficulty here is that I will need two motors sufficiently strong to hold two sheets, a bunch of circuitry, a battery (more on that later) and a pair of jeans in place, even when the jeans may be making the weight unbalanced. I imagine such motors exist, but I haven't looked in to specifics, and I'm afraid they'll probably be power hogs. I think the sheets will have to be a bit smaller than the shoot so the motor stators can be attached to the shoot and the sheets attached to the rotors. The motor on the side with the door will have to be able to come unscrewed from the door so I don't tear everything apart when I open the door.

Power is a bit of a problem. I would like this unit to be self contained, and therefore not running on outlet power. (I would also like to not have a power outlet in my laundry shoot, because that just seems a little absurd, even for a mad scientist mansion. On the other hand, I could live with it.) This means a battery. The stronger the motors have to be, the more power they'll use and the larger the battery will have to be. However, the larger the battery is, the more powerful the motors will have to be to support it. I will have to figure out some optimality function later.

Now, for the electrical side of things. I was hoping to avoid this, but I think I'm going to need a little microprocessor. The thing is, the control loop is as follows:

1. Has a piece of clothing fallen down the shaft? (Probably I will determine this with a light sensor.)
2. If so, is the clothing light or dark? (A color sensor. Probably using the same sensor to answer both questions.)
3. Turn motors 45 degrees in the proper direction.
4. Turn motors 45 degrees back.
5. Has the clothing fallen off the platform?
6. If not, return to step 3.
7. If so, return to step 1.

Not horrible, but complicated enough to be hard-ish exclusively in hardware. It is also extremely likely I will want some status information in the bedroom, especially when I'm testing. (Did you register this as light or dark? Did you even see it at all? Why are you oscillating wildly? etc.) But even when it's all working, I might want a "ready/not ready." At this point, it relies on the user to only put one piece of clothing at a time down the shaft. I'm okay with that for now. And it certainly has no way to store clothes when the washer/dryers are running.

On top of that, it might be really useful to have an on/off switch in the bedroom. The problem is, if you want to determine color, you need to have light, but it's ridiculous for a machine that needs to run for five minutes a day to be shining a light all the time. It would use unnecessary power (remember that battery I'm trying to keep as small as possible?) and, let's be honest, it would be really creepy to have a light shining up your laundry shoot while you're trying to sleep. So it might be nice for me to be able to turn that light off, which means I need to be able to communicate with it from the bedroom.

Bottom line: this could probably be done in hardware, but it might be a lot  easier in software. I'm thinking about a raspberry pi board. I don't have any experience with  them, but I've heard good things, and they seem cheap and simple, which is the goal here. Don't know if it could drive as powerful motors as I would need, but it might be worth experimenting. Relays could solve the problem.

Also, I haven't really addressed to problem of how to figure out the colors. That is, as an old boss of mine used to say, a "tomorrow problem."

And this is the easy part...