SensingDesign complete (stages 1–6), not built

CycleTap

Independent cycle counts for apartment laundry rooms

Stick-on pucks count every washer and dryer cycle in a shared laundry room, so the owner can audit the route operator's statement, renegotiate the renewal with real data and catch down machines on day one.

Who buys it: Owners and property managers of 20–300-unit apartment buildings, condo boards and student housing on revenue-share laundry contracts, or with their own machines.
Why it pays: An 8-machine room grosses about $1,800/month (est.). A 5-point better split at renewal is worth about $7,560 over a 7-year contract (est.), against a $399 audit.
Target price: $399 per room 90-day audit; room plan $99 gateway + $35/puck + $15/room/month (targets)
First-minute wow: The audit report shows each machine's real cycles per day next to the operator's statement, and flags the dryer that has been dead since Tuesday.

See the CAD design Concept page

CycleTap concept: the idea and where each part goes — The concept. The CAD design is below, under Printable CAD.

What the research found

And how this design answers it

Cheap home vibration sensors (Aqara T1 ~$17–19 with Matter) → CycleTap leaves the home market and sells to apartment owners, who need tamper mounting, a fleet gateway and cycle counts
Route operators already show residents availability (CSC GO, LaundryView) → CycleTap's data is the owner's, independent of the operator, for audits of 50/50–75/25 revenue splits
Modern washers run too smoothly → adds an LIS2MDL magnetometer that senses the motor's stray field, and rejects vibration from neighbouring machines
Theft in shared rooms → VHB plate with a lip, pin-Torx tamper screw into a heat-set insert, battery door facing the plate
Basement radio and building IT → BLE coded PHY to a gateway in the same room with its own LTE-M uplink
Dryer heat → ASA parts and L91 lithium cells on dryers, tested at the cabinet top

Use case

Renewal audit, 14 months out

Building ownerProperty managerRoute operator rep

01Trigger: the 7-year route contract ends next year and the operator offers the same split
02Detection: 8 pucks and a gateway count cycles per machine for 90 days
03Alert: the report shows real cycles/day, peak hours and down-days against the statements
04Action: the owner negotiates the split with data, or puts the room out to bid

Outcome: About $90/month more owner share from a 5-point better split, about $7,560 over the term (est.)

How it works

Architecture

01
Sense: LIS2DW12 vibration FIFO and LIS2MDL motor field on each machine
02
Decide: ESP32-C6 learns each machine's phases and counts full and partial cycles on the puck
03
Send: encrypted BLE coded-PHY frames to a room gateway, then MQTT/TLS over LTE-M or Wi-Fi
04
Tell: cycle ledger, audit report, statement reconciliation, down-machine and tamper alerts, QR free-now page

Hardware

Real parts, buyable today

Bill of materials: about $21.50 per puck and $58 per LTE gateway at qty 10 (est.).

Block	Part	Why this part
Puck MCU + radio	ESP32-C6-MINI-1-N4	BLE 5 coded PHY; the same board runs Matter-over-Thread for a home side line
Vibration	ST LIS2DW12TR	Wake-on-motion and FIFO; $0.64 at LCSC
Motor field	ST LIS2MDLTR	Senses the motor even on smooth HE washers; rejects neighbours
Power	2x Energizer L91 + TI TPS63900	~0.8 mAh/day in a busy room; 3+ year target
Room uplink	ESP32-C6 + SIMCom SIM7080G	LTE-M independent of building Wi-Fi; 7-day offline buffer

Mechanical

Printable CAD

8 parts, generated from code and checked as closed solids. Pick a part to inspect it, or download the STL files to print.

See the CAD parts render

CycleTap printable parts, rendered from the CAD — Render of the printable parts from the actual CAD. Not yet printed or photographed.

Loading the CAD…

Real CAD · drag to rotate · scroll to zoomReal CAD · swipe sideways

Open risks we are working on

Owners may already trust their route statements; the audit pitch must be tested with 5 property managers first
Route contracts may restrict attaching devices to operator-owned machines (unverified)
Operators may push back with their own LaundryView data
Savings rest on assumed vend prices and turns per machine; validate per room

Design stage only: nothing on this page is for sale. Specifications and prices are targets.