No sign-up sheets.
Just message the bot.
LaundryBot turns a dorm's washers and dryers into a guided Telegram conversation — pick a machine, set a timer, and it frees itself automatically when time's up.
The interface is the conversation.
The real bot replies in Italian for its dorm — this is the English gist.
It only offers what's free.
Machines only show up as options if nothing's using them. A background task tracks every booking's timer and releases the machine automatically — or you can free it early. Everything's written to a local JSON file, so a restart doesn't lose a single booking; anything already expired is just quietly dropped on load.
/startBegin a new booking — a guided conversation/viewShow active bookings with remaining time/freeRelease a machine before the timer expires/cancelAbort the current operation mid-conversation/helpList available commandsBuilt for one dorm, on purpose.
Long polling over webhooks, deliberately. This runs on a student laptop, not a server with a public IP or SSL certificate — long polling needs no infrastructure at all. Moving to webhooks later is a one-line change.
JSON over SQLite, for the same reason. At most 9 machines are ever booked at once — a database would add a dependency with no real benefit at this scale.
requirements.txt still lists Flask, held in reserve for a future webhook or dashboard that doesn't exist yet — and data/users.json sits in the repo without a single line of app.py reading it.
What's protected, what isn't.
Token stays local. config.py is gitignored and never committed.
No data leaves the host. Bookings live in a local JSON file — no external database.
No open ports. Long polling only calls out to Telegram; nothing listens for inbound connections.
No authentication yet. Anyone who finds the bot on Telegram can use it — a chat_id whitelist is the recommended fix before a wider rollout.
Set it up for your own dorm.
Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/mirconegri/LaundryBot.git
Set up the environment
python -m venv venv then pip install -r requirements.txt
Add your bot token
cp config.example.py config.py, then set BOT_TOKEN — get one from @BotFather on Telegram.
Run it
python app.py — then message your bot /start.
Built in the open, one load at a time.
Look at the code, open an issue, or adapt it for your own dorm.