Laundry can be one of the biggest hassles for any college student.

Most can say they constantly are running back and forth between a dorm or apartment and the laundry room to check and see if laundry is finished. Or worse, sometimes the laundry is forgotten and by the time a student gets there it’s been taken out of the washer or dryer and left in a piled mess.

But this Friday, there will be a project showcased at the MSU College of Engineering Design Day that has the potential to put all of these problems to rest.

Launder, a laundry room tablet payment system, comes with an app that sends a text message directly to the phone of the person doing the laundry when it is finished, relieving people of constantly checking or forgetting to check laundry at all.

A team of MSU students have been working on the app and payment system for Whirlpool Corporation, after the company expressed the desire to develop such a technology in an effort to tackle the common problems that come with sharing laundry machines with numerous people.

The team members and MSU students who developed Launder are Angie Sun, Sam Bentzel, Evan Swinehart and Alex Kambeitz, all of them computer science seniors.

Sun is the project manager of Sun and said that the app is all about centralizing the laundry experience and that it will alleviate the annoances and time-consuming nature of the conventional public laundry facilities.

“If there’s no washers available, you can ask for a text notification, and it will text you when the next washer or dryer is available, so that way you don’t have to stand around and guard the machine, you can do something with your own time.” Sun said. “It’ll also send you notifications when your washer is almost done.”

Sun added that since the payment system is based on a central tablet, that this allows users to just swipe a credit card, rather than having to carry around change.

Professor Wayne Dyksen, who is in charge of the computer science capstone course, oversaw the Launder project and said that it’s very complicated and takes extensive education in computer science.

“This is an interesting one because this is software that actually has to interact with hardware, namely the washers and dryers,” Dyksen said. “It’s not just an app interacting with a person, it’s an app interacting with a person and hardware in the back end, the washers and dryers.”

Launder and many other capstone projects will be showcased at the College of Engineering Design Day on May 1 from 8 a.m. to noon in the Engineering Building.

This is the 22nd year of Design Day and this year will be the largest ever. It will include 882 students and features 10 undergraduate degree programs.