Imagine the disappointment of gathering laundry, bringing it all the way downstairs or to the laundry building, just for there to be no washing machines or dryers open. It’s a truly terrible feeling for many students.
In an attempt to fight this constant occurrence, Aditya Dubey, a sixth-semester computer science engineering major, set out his sophomore year to create an application that will be universally available on Apple and Android products that can keep track of the use of all the washing machines and dryers in each laundry room across The University of Connecticut campus.
Two years ago, Dubey, along with a team of two others, received funding from the university to automate the laundry rooms in Buckley and Shippee. They installed sensors in both the washing machines and dryers and hung flyers with a QR code to access a webpage that would show which machines were in use and which were not. After some consideration, they realized that it wasn’t quite feasible and that the team wasn’t yet educated enough in that sphere of technology to make this an accomplished project.
As that project died down, Dubey took a step back to further his studies in CSE. By the end of his sophomore year, he had redesigned his project and began to work on it once again, however this time solo.
His new design consists of a user-friendly web application universally accepted by all types of smartphones or laptops. Upon opening the webpage, there are four options to choose from: “Laundry Update,” “Laundry Check,” “User Guide” and “About Me.” To see which machines are open and which are in use, and for how long they will be in use for, simply choose “Laundry Check,” and choose a building.
The only catch to this new application is that it relies on the machine-user to keep it up to date. When selecting a washer or dryer, a student needs to select “Laundry Update,” the name of the laundry room, the machine type, enter its identification number and enter the amount of time it will be in use for.
“I definitely want to make this campus wide,” Dubey said.
In order to accomplish this though, he’s asking for help from the student body to email him the washing machine and dryer IDs in each laundry room to update his webapp. In the past, there have been two other attempts to make similar applications, but neither took off. Dubey has hopes that his will given that, “half the college is going to be almost new if you think about it. All of the sophomores and freshmen.”
With this occurring, he is working alongside UConn Residential Life to help integrate the use of this application into the daily lives of the student population. It will hopefully become a habit amongst the younger Huskies to fill out a “Laundry Update” form each time they use a washer or dryer. According to Dubey, he’s ready to let his application loose and see what happens with his project.