Hi.
Not shure if this is the correct forum, but here goes nothing.
A friend of mine confronted me with a problem he has.
He rents out some appartments and they have a common clothes washer and dryer, and he has a suspicion that the dryer is used all the time.
the dryer has 4 users.
so what he wants is to be able to log the usage of the dryer, so that if one of the user uses it excessively he can give them a warning or make them pay.

So what I figured is that this would be a nice project for me to learn to use a arduino.
What I have planned is:
The front panel of the dryer gets 4 extra LEDs, one for each user.
the users LED will light up once he/she has identyfied himself by holding a RFID-tag in the same area as the LEDs, this LED will blink when the dryer is finished, and keep blinking until the next user has "loged in", so that if he/se has forgot something, or made a mess, the last user is easily identifyed.
next, when the user is logged in, a relay that is mounted in series with the start-button on the dryer, makes contact, so the dryer can be started, and when the dryer is finished another relay will give a signal back to the arduino.
the thing that I need the most help/input on is how to store/read the information about the number of usages.
one option is to have a 5th. RFID tag that when used makes the LED for each user blink out the number of times he/she has used it since last time the 5th. tag was read.
I guess this is the cheapest and easiest way to do this.
and I guess I need a SD-card or something to save the information, in case there is a loss of power. (or does the arduino remember stuff anyways?)
another way would be to mont a ethernet-shield and a web page where the usage is listed, and maybe have a password protected counter reset.
the problem is that this requires a ethernet-cable to be installed.....
Need to know what I should buy so I can get started on this
Any input would be appreciated
