How to go about this kind of physical world sensor

This is probably NOT the right category for this question but I couldn’t find a better one… Sorry…

I wanted to monitor our washing line for the following state: clothes on it drying and rain arriving!

I’ve got the rain detection covered nicely, but I cannot figure out how to monitor the laundry line for clothes…

If it was just strung up when we had clothes on it I’d use a mercury or tilt switch to monitor an end of the line itself…but because it’s not reliably taken down…I’m at a bit of a loss…

Of course I could monitor the washing machine end of cycle and then check for a fine, warm day between February and November condition and do some “logic” there…but

Any better ideas??

Thanks!2705_Telescopic_Clothes-Line_Prop_garden

I’ve been thinking about this too. Best I’ve come up with so far is if the laundry door is opened after the washing machine finishes.

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how about a cheap camera that points to the wall and detects motion?
motion = clothes on the line

maybe some type of a spring gauge back at the house where if the clothes line has weight on it, the spring gauge is pulled to on position, but when the line doesn’t have weight on it, it comes back up to another “off” position…

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In my case I actually have a PIR covering the line area and want to disable movement detection when washing is on the line as it false triggers a lot in the wind.

It would require a bit of manual intervention but you could use a button/switch of some kind to set when clothes are out. It’s not quite as “automation-y” as you might like but it would work.

Get a dash button or something and set that up for that single use.

A load cell sensor on each point the line fixes to ? That way you could see what the “weigh” was when the line was just up, with no washing (give your self some wiggle room for tuning) then when it goes above X you can safely assume there is something on the line, washing, a bird, squirrel …

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Just had a thought. Slightly going about it in an unusual way…my wife takes the peg bag out when she’s pegging out clothes…I could maybe embed an RFID tag in the peg bag…
This is how madness starts!

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Oh yes, I find my self finding things to automate, and trying to think of edge cases, so I can code for them.

Machine learning camera module on a pi.

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We have a winner !

Are you seeerrrious? I’ve looked into it and it didn’t at first glance (or second) look realistic - but I’m all ears!

Yes definitely. There are a couple of different options if you Google them.

Buy a dryer

I did Google them - I found an example but it seemed to suggest I’d need to feed it 100 images of washing drying on a line? Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Sounds about right I have no personal experience but machine learning with camera would be the only reliable way to do it

images of clothes drying on a calm day, on a windy day, in the rain, in the sun, with someone hanging the clothes, with out anyone near the clothes line, with the clothes line up, with the clothes line down, all of those different scenarios so it can figure out what’s important and what isn’t. Even then it won’t be perfect. Face recognition is relatively simple compared to picking something like a line out of a picture.

Unless maybe you used a fluorescent line or something and a light that would make it stand out. Then maybe the camera could pick it up from the background clutter.

Sorry if I come up simple minded, but why not have a simple camera that tracks if there is motion?
You can easily create a mask to only look for motion in a specific area. Create a mask that only covers the clothe line and if there’s been motion in the last [say] 5 min for 5 min, you have clothes on the line?

Motion would trigger with putting up clothes, taking down clothes and maybe trigger with people walking past the line.

And not trigger when not windy.