System and method for washing machine cycle identification and chemical

Abstract

A chemical dispensing system controller is used in conjunction with a mechanism for dispensing specified chemicals and a device that transmits trigger signals to the control system for requesting chemicals to be dispensed. The controller receives and accumulates sequences of the transmitted trigger signals. Each trigger signal sequence is preceded and followed by a period of time of predefined duration during which no trigger signals are received. At least some of the trigger signals in some of the trigger signal sequences are not received simultaneously. Also, the number of distinct chemical feed requests that can be communicated using the accumulated trigger signals exceeds the number of distinct trigger signals. The controller maps a first subset of the accumulated trigger signal sequences into chemical feed requests, each of which requests a quantity of a corresponding chemical. The controller enables the dispensing of chemicals in accordance with the chemical feed requests. A second subset of the accumulated trigger signal sequences are mapped into wash classification codes, each of which identifies a type of wash load to be washed using the dispensed chemicals. The number of distinct wash classification codes that can be communicated using the accumulated trigger signals exceeds the number of distinct trigger signals. When the control system uses a classification dependent feed arrangement, the chemical feed request corresponding to each received trigger signal sequence is determined based on both the current wash load type and the accumulated sequence of trigger signals.