When the washing machine is finished announce it over Alex

Configuration
1

Hi, Newbie here so please be gentle.

I have AH running on a Nuc. Have got a number of automations going with Node_Red.

What I want to do is have Alexa broadcast that the washing machine has finished it’s cycle.

I have a Sonoff Pow R2 Module so I can measure the power usage.

at rest, the machine uses 1 watt.

this is close but not in Node Red.

I assume the Alexa bit is the easiest to do.

Does anyone some ideas? is the power in watts the best senor to use?

2

I power monitor my washer and created a template binary sensor using the watts to se if its running or not.

Then just use the template to trigger a tts for your alexa.

3

I’m using NR to monitor power from Shelly PlugS. Because of power variability and my limited NR’s knowledge at time of doing this I wrote simple JS function which evaluates input data. Likely it’s possible to do tgat other way. But it works.

When finished, NR sends notification to mobile phones of persons who are at home.
Besides of that, the flow creates new binary sensor just for presentation purposes in Lovelace.
It’s bit different than you need but I can share the code if you want

4

iI use ESPHome on my sockets.

This part of the code gives you activity status…

text_sensor:
  # Device Activity State
  # e.g. shows as active if power reading above a certain threshold
  - platform: template
    name: "${friendly_name} Activity State"
    icon: "mdi:${main_icon}"
    lambda: |-
      if (id(power).state >= $activity_threshold) {
        return {"Active"};
      } else {
        return {"Idle"};
      }
    update_interval: 5s

threshold can be adjusted in substitutions.

# Substitutions
substitutions:
  # Device Names
  device_name: "###"
  friendly_name: "###"
  # Icon
  main_icon: "power-socket-uk"
  # Default Relay State
  # Aka: `restore_mode` in documentation
  # Options: `RESTORE_DEFAULT_OFF`, `RESTORE_DEFAULT_ON`, `ALWAYS_ON` & `ALWAYS_OFF`
  default_state: "ALWAYS_ON"
  # Activity State Threshold
  # Threshold (number) that the device will change from `Idle` to `Active` if power is greater than or equal to
  activity_threshold: "5"

Regards,