Introducing the Dish-O-Tron 6000!

You may remember Quinn Dunki’s LED Heart Pendant project that she did last month, inspired by Charles Platt’s Make: Electronics book. Quinn has struck again, this time creating a device that attaches to her dishwasher to tell her what state the contents are in. She writes:

I’m absentminded in general, but especially when it comes to the dishwasher. I can never remember whether the dishes are clean, whether the machine needs to be run, or emptied, or whatever. I needed a solution to this problem. My first thought was to hang a flippable sign on the door that said “clean” on one side, and “dirty” on the other. Simple, logical, functional. My second thought was, “What?!? That’s dangerously under-engineered. I can make something much more ridiculous than that.”

This contraption is the result.

Sounds like fun to us! You can access the project via the Make: Project widget below, or directly, on this link. To find out more about Quinn, her site is called BlondiHacks.

A million thanks to Quinn for loading this project onto MAKE, and for doing such fun work. We can wait to see what shenanigans to get up to next!

Dish-O-Tron 6000

More:
Beating Heart LED Pendant

2 Responses to Introducing the Dish-O-Tron 6000!

Guillaume Filion on April 18th, 2011 at 11:28 pm said:

That’s pretty cool, but I don’t get the initial premise: can’t you just look in the dishwasher and see if the dishes are clean? I guess it wouldn’t be as cool as using this device!

Reply ↓
Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 11:36 pm said:

No. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. If you rinse off your dishes first, like we do in our house, and if people start removing clean dishes for use without unloading, you have to start inspecting, smelling, looking for tiny puddles of water, yelling to your housemates: “Are the dishes clean?” That’s why people frequently use some sort of flippable sign on the door, or other indicator.

Reply ↓