SwitchYourLoad is a webapp that helps you manage your laundry machine by integrating laundry timers with profiles to let you know which load is in your laundry machine.

Intially build as part of the 12-hour Hack CU Local Hack Day by JP, Julietta, and Kayla.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6vBu6N-Ds8

When you're sharing a laundry load, it's hard to organize who's clothes are in the washer. When you don't recognize a laundry load in the washing machine, it becomes a process to figure out who's it is. This makes doing laundry something that can become tedious and annoying. Our goal was to make a project that made life easier for people everywhere. We came up with something in our daily routines that could be improved and created a website to do it.

Our website SwitchYourLoad helps organize who is doing a laundry load. When logging onto the website, the user creates a profile complete with a picture. When the user puts a laundry load into the washing machine, they track the type of load they are washing. The website then uses a built-in countdown timer to track how long the load will take. Once the load is complete, the website alerts the user. While the load is running, the website displays whos load is in the washing machine, and how long until it is complete.

We collaborated using "repl.it", a text editor online. All the images and icons on the website were created using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

One of the major challenges we ran into, was creating the countdown timer. We really struggled with creating the "hours" portion and spent a majority of the hackathon trying to fix bugs we had in our code. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to iron out all of the bugs from the timer select.

Something we're super proud of is the design and user experience of the app. Building our app with the Bulma CSS framework, we were able to quickly and easily design a UI that we really liked.

All of the creators on this project were varied in skill. Some were experienced in JavaScript, some in HTML, and some in design. This meant that in order to complete our goal, we had to work together and communicate. We learned how to support each other, and work together to ensure that we were not duplicating effort.

We plan to re-build the app from the ground up as a PWA, which would allow the app to be installable on devices that could be mounted to a washing machine. Next, we want to add text-message notifications when the load is done for the person who is switching the load, as well as for additional profiles who want to get their laundry load in directly after the preview load. Another thing we want to add is a way to schedule loads for the future and collaborate on schedules between profiles. We want to take SwitchYourLoad to the next level!