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eSuds

Posted by michael on from the tiny-bubbles dept.

AndyAMPohl writes "An article from Yahoo! News mentions IBM plugging washers and dryers into the internet. This has several advantages: coins aren't needed since credit cards are accepted, the machines can be monitored through the web for maintenance purposes and to see if there are any machines available, and users can even control things like add soap!" The eSuds homepage has informations, FAQs, etc.

3 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Gratuitous Link Alert! by Your_Mom · · Score: 4, Informative

    Of course, this has already been done byt the Geeks at MIT

    --
    Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
  2. Nevermind that... by billbaggins · · Score: 3, Informative
    The anti-geeks at Macalester (liberal arts, St. Paul, MN) did it a couple years ago too. Monitoring isn't possible, but we did pay by swiping our student ID cards, and whole system was connected to the ethernet.

    There was one eensy tiny problem when they set it up, though... somebody misconfigured the machines, so that they tried to set themselves up as router/gateways for our network... no Internet for Mac for about a week until they figured out what was going on...

    --
    "The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
    --Winston Churchill
  3. Already been done by v13 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I just graduated from Boston College this May. The majority of the washers and dryers on campus were already networked into the student billing system allowing students to pay for their laundry on their student ID that also functioned as our key to the buildings/library/meal/bookstore/dominos take delivery/card. We could add money to our accounts via credit card anytime we wanted.