Import old blog posts

_posts/2013-04-09-visualizing-laundry-usage.md

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+---
+title: Visualizing Laundry Usage
+layout: post
+---
+
+George Mason University uses a system called
+[eSuds](http://www.usatech.com/esuds/) to control the laundry machine
+transactions in the dorms. What makes eSuds really cool though, is that it
+keeps track of the status of every machine and displays it on a
+[website](http://gmu.esuds.net/) so students can check how full the machines
+are before making the trek down to the laundry rooms. The system emails each
+student when their laundry is finished as well.
+
+The only problem is that their user interface is pretty atrocious. I wrote up a
+[usability analysis](https://gist.github.com/thallada/5351114) of the site for
+my *SWE 205: Software Usability Analysis and Design* class, but most people
+agree it's a pretty painful interface to use ([just see for
+yourself](http://gmu.esuds.net/)). The thing is, most of the information that's
+on the website could be reduced to a few charts. I'm a big fan of simplifying
+data, so I thought: why not?
+
+I decided to create the visualizations with [pygal](http://pygal.org/), because
+the charts it spits out are absolutely gorgeous and well... it's in python,
+which made it easy for me to dive right in. I'll probably try out
+[d3js](http://d3js.org/) for my next visualization project though, it looks a
+whole lot more advanced.
+
+###Current laundry usage charts###
+
+I created an [app](/laundry) in [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/) to
+display current laundry machine usage charts for all of the laundry rooms on
+George Mason's campus. All of the data is scraped from the eSuds site using
+[Beautiful Soup](http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/) and updated
+every time you refresh the page.
+
+<div style="text-align: center"><a href="/laundry" alt="See it in action"><img
+src="/static/img/laundry_preview.png" /></a></div>
+
+The site will save which laundry room you select so when you come back you will
+immediately see the chart for your laundry room.
+
+You can see the code for this on my
+[GitHub](https://github.com/thallada/personalsite/) (look in the "laundry"
+folder).
+
+The point was to make this as dead simple and easy to use as possible. Do you
+think I succeeded?
+
+###Weekly laundry usage chart###
+
+Knowing the *current* laundry machine usage is nice for saving a wasted trip
+down to the laundry room, but what if you wanted to plan ahead and do your
+laundry when you know other people are less likely to do laundry? That's why I
+recorded the laundry usage with a [cronjob](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron)
+every 15 minutes for an entire week: to get an idea of when there is a high
+probability of open machines.
+
+<embed type="image/svg+xml" src="/static/record.svg">
+
+This one is a little interactive.
+
+As you can see, the laundry usage jumps around all over the place very quickly.
+This definitely provides evidence to some previous frustrations I've had when I
+had checked eSuds, saw that most machines were open, and arrived in the laundry
+room to suddenly find that no machines were open.
+
+**So when is the best time to do laundry?**
+
+After analyzing the data for a bit, I noticed that there still seemed to be
+quite a bit of usage around midnight and 1 AM, which, I suppose, would be
+expected of college students. However, after about 2 AM the laundry usage
+consistently teeters off until about 10 AM. So I guess there's no way around
+it; if you want to have the laundry room to yourself, you'll have to be the
+early bird.
+
+Also, I should note that this was during the week of spring break. I'm
+currently working on recording data over a few normal weeks and then compiling
+it into one average week in order to see the patterns more clearly. I'll post
+again once I've done that.
+
+This was a lot of fun and I expect to make more data visualizations in the
+future.
+
+**Let me know what you think!**
+
+EDIT: Check out the [comments on
+Reddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/gmu/comments/1c1ehg/i_dont_like_esuds/).