Great hack, but I’m sure any engineer worth their salt winces at the thought of a machine in their home roundtripping through far away 3rd party servers (I guess they’re the manufacturer’s, but if it’s hardware I own in my house those servers are 3rd party to me) just to notify them of a numerical value when they’re sitting literally 10 meters away (I live in the countryside and experience internet interruptions not infrequently, things running locally matter a lot to me).
I was thinking the other day as I was remodeling my kitchen that I would happily pay several times the price of regular appliances (fridge, clothes washer, dish washer) if they were built with a tasteful, minimalist design (eg 1960s Braun style), quality materials, and fully open source PCB/firmware/schematics/etc. I’m probably not the only one. It’d be a weird niche market but perhaps there’s something there.
If you tie it with the building consumer awareness of right to repair, anti consumerism, planned obsolescence, etc, the marketing just writes itself.
Maybe that’s a kind of company I want to start myself, having worked in consumer hardware for a long time and thinking about my next step, but if anyone wants to take the idea go ahead.
I actually worked on an App for a company that made home appliances. Originally they made everything local, so direct App to Washing machine communication. They had a really hard time with that approach for a number of reasons.
The first, and most obvious, reason is that getting your phone and (all) your appliances on the same network is non-trivial. Especially for a novice user. Sometimes the washing machine is in the basement and can't connect to your WiFi. Or maybe you're simply outside your house in your car and can't connect to your local network. The cloud approach solves this.
The other, not so obvious reason, is that the manufacturer made a ton of devices. Some of them a decade old, with very rudimentary interfaces. Originally the App had to handle special cases and workarounds for dozens of devices. This became a problem once they tried to port it to multiple platforms. For Android and iPhone they started with a shared C++ library. But that quickly became a problem, once they wanted to interface with popular home network and automation solutions.
To solve all this they decided to build a cloud API that would resolve all these problems in one go. A single, unified API with a modern HTTP interface and available via the internet. That solves the workaround and compatability issues by having a single abstraction layer (instead of one per app). It solves the "on the go" problem when you're not in you local wifi. It enables you to control devices outside your home network in a true IoT sense.
I totally agree with you that, if you're not in an urban environment with good internet and cell coverage, the advantages dwindle away. Also, of course, there is the privacy concern that is very real. At the end of the day the cloud solution is selected for the same reason companies select Electron. It saves development time and is very easy for the average end user to use. At the expense of performance and privacy.
Not judging, but you represent such a small fraction of the market that companies simply don’t deem it worth it when looking at the cost of supporting LAN-only. Just imagine the support tickets they’ll get.
Oh yeah, I'm fully aware of that. Somewhat ironically, the one device (garage door opener) that I did allow to do its cloud thing works so poorly that I gave up on trying to make it work and turned off the WiFi. The remote open never worked, the "notify me when the door is open after 9pm" alerts would arrive days later, etc. And, of course, the user interface looked and felt like one developed by an industry where the existing UX was a single button.
> The first, and most obvious, reason is that getting your phone and (all) your appliances on the same network is non-trivial.
What other networks do homes have? Every WiFi ISP router I have used provides a single network and DHCP server. Perhaps some routers provide both a public and private WiFi and the consumer doesn't understand which one they should pick but that is the fault of the ISP.
> Sometimes the washing machine is in the basement and can't connect to your WiFi. Or maybe you're simply outside your house in your car and can't connect to your local network. The cloud approach solves this.
How does the cloud fix poor/no WiFi signals? This is pure ignorance. Perhaps you are confusing cloud with "stick a SIM in everything" 5g marketing which isn't really a thing yet. I stopped reading the rest of your post at that point.
Many cases I knew, people would have several repeaters and extra routers to extend coverage in big houses, and not set it up correctly in PA/Bridge mode, so peripheral network devices would be locked behind in a separate NAT’ed subnet.
I've dealt with this a ton trying to help troubleshoot people's home network problems during the early days of COVID WFH. [1] Some of the absolute messes I'd see were astounding, and they thought everything worked fine because all their phones and Apple TVs and kids PCs running Steam could all get to their cloud stuff fine, so why couldn't their company laptop talk to the printer they brought home and plugged into the "router" in the basement?
[1] Not something we'd /normally/ do, but when that was going on... You just had to get people working.
We can consider it, but Miele won’t. Their problem is connecting your washer to your phone and going through the cloud has other side benefits for them as well, such as telemetry, so here we are and will be.
> Every WiFi ISP router I have used provides a single network
Actually, many provide multiple SSIDs (5GHz and 2.4GHz). While you’d think these would be interoperable, it’s a massive pain in the ass. IoT devices only have the 2.4GHz antenna. And you want your main devices on 5GHz for speed. If you combine the 2.4 and 5 networks into a single said and let band steering work, IoT devices often don’t place nicely. If they’re separate, then you have to rely on the custom local app to see a server running on the other ssid. Another issue on top of that is apps on iOS will be required to use SSL for HTTP connections, and making sure your washing machine has always up-to-date certificates is also not simple.
> What other networks do homes have? Every WiFi ISP router I have used provides a single network and DHCP server. Perhaps some routers provide both a public and private WiFi and the consumer doesn't understand which one they should pick but that is the fault of the ISP.
Think of times when your phone might not have connected to WiFi because you just got home, or are in some random dead spot. Or it just... isn't for a moment.
From the perspective of many consumers, without that always-available-via-cloud central point, it's then "broken".
Put it all in the cloud and so long as the phone and the device can get to "the internet" it'll be working.
What if the person has two networks at home? Or ends up on the neighbor's that they sometime use? Or their saved guest network? The user could well think "I am..." whether they are or aren't.
How would the phone know the /right/ network? All it can really know is it can't find the appliance.
They clearly stated that getting devices on the same network is non-trivial. Obviously, at a place where no network access exists anyways, neither local nor cloud solutions will work.
If somebody required WiFi in an area of the home where it wasn't already, why not just use a repeater/mesh node? If someone wants their smart appliance online, a few extra dollars on top of a likely three-to-four digit purchase appliance is nothing.
I’d pay more for NO firmware in my washing machine.
This is beyond my desire to just keep things simple. What is the point of washing machine you can control remotely? You have to put clothes in at the start and take them out at the end. It offers no convenience.
I disagree. I would like a machine that I could start when I want, I don't like when I start a load before leaving the day then having it sit in the damp until I get home to put it in the dryer. I would prefer to be able to start it an hour before I was going home so it would be ready for transfer to the dryer then.
I also would like phone notifications, it is sort of in a corner of the basement so I don't hear the alarms.
A mechanical controlled washing machine with a mechanical timer on the plug would, reliably, achieve the same thing. no need for networks and external servers.
A timed controlled smart plug, with current monitoring, would be able to achieve the IOT aspect of the problem.
It would need to be a very specific kind of washing machine (that hopefully probably exists) to make your idea work.
A fully analog/mechanical washing machine is just a big mechanical timer controlled relay behind the knob like a toaster oven. If you set it without power, it just runs through the timer without doing anything.
The machine would need to have a timer mechanism that is turned by an electric clock motor, not a mechanical spring with gears etc.
Or you could possibly set up an electric actuator that blocks the knob from turning. Then trigger both the power-on relay and the actuator retraction to do both at the same time.
>The machine would need to have a timer mechanism that is turned by an electric clock motor,
Pure mechanical timer based washing machines have been driven by electric clock motors (line powered) for at least 50 years (as that is as far back as I remember knowing how they worked). So if line power is out, the timer does not run.
Of course, the delay timer on the line would need enough power handling capacity to carry the load of the washing machine.
> A fully analog/mechanical washing machine is just a big mechanical timer controlled relay behind the knob like a toaster oven. If you set it without power, it just runs through the timer without doing anything.
My washer has dials to select the modes and then a final push button that activates an internal relay (guessing from the loud mechanical switching sound it makes when it goes on). If all you need to do is complete the circuit of the push button. You can just unmount that push button and hook its wires up to your timer mechanism which completes the circuit when the timer expires.
The dryer on the other hand does have a mechanical timer. But that doesn't activate until you turn the dryer on with the push button. So you could set the time of the dryer and not turn it on either, and use the same mechanism as above.
Toaster ovens use spring wound timers, as they are simple and easy to mass manufacture. Its a simple time off delay
Mechanical Washing machines don't use spring wound clocks, they run of the AC frequency of the mains. It generally drives a small solenoid that increments the clock.
The control drum is significant more complex than a toaster ovens timer
My current electronic washing machine saves its current cycle state when it looses power, and happily continues when power resumes 2 hours later (unlike my dishwasher, which does not). Although You'd have to start it before turning off the relay, so not as easy as the old mechanical dials
I highly doubt a mechanical timer would be more reliable than a micro and some buttons.
I can't think of a single mechanical device that is more reliable than an equivalent solid-state version of that same device.
Solid state relay vs electromechanical relay. Timex quartz watch vs. an automatic or manual watch.
Laundry rooms can be both hot and cold, are almost always humid, are often home to caustic chemicals, and a dryer's components are constantly exposed to dust in the form of lint: the perfect use case for solid state.
Spraying a pcb with a coating is much cheaper and more reliable than sealing a mechanical mechanism.
Instead of resisting, the smart move is to agitate for and promote secure, open, standards.
I guess there is some utility then. I find that to be very narrow and outside my personal preferences but recognize that you find it useful.
In theory you don’t need a computer/internet to start it later, but that would require you knowing when you want to start it upfront. Meaning there is still a unique capability for the smart washer.
It’s nice, I’m with you, but if your machine have tiny screen with remaining time (yes it’s not very accurate) - “hey siri set timer for 90minutes” works fine enough.
I'm also in favor of simplicity, but I think there is an increase in reliability from a microcontroller-based system over one built from discrete logic gates, a mechanical timer, or electromechanical relays. I get that you might not want updatable firmware or might not want communications off the board, but you probably do want a microcontroller-based (with the associated firmware) machine.
It’s less about desire and imagining there may be perfectly reasonable scenarios that exist without one needing to be aware of them or them having to be universally applicable.
I found little utility for appliances with remote access until the number of humans to keep fed and clothed grew beyond myself and a partner.
How?
Every little tweak can add up to a staggering amount of time around monotony in a lifetime.
Miele already offer this on newer washing machine. They can connect to your inverter too and start a load when there is available local solar/battery/low spot prices.
It’s called “SmartStart”
It works very well in my experience. Load the machine in the morning, and it will start later in the day, then send my phone a notification when the load is done
You load the machine say in the afternoon/evening after work etc, and then it decides based on historical data that 02:35 is the local minima and starts. You run the quick 1-hour program because it's Good Enough(tm), then the laundry lies wet in the machine from 03:45 until you wake up around 06:00 to start your day hanging it? In my experience, but perhaps this is just local circumstance (climate etc) you can't leave damp laundry in the machine for hours on end, it will get smelly and need to be re-washed.
Also, not being able to plan when you deal with the wet laundry because of the power price hunting feature sounds super annoying and stressful. Perhaps there's an assumption that after the laundry it will also tumble dry; we rarely do that due to it being bad for the clothes and costly in energy etc.
In Europe spot prices are announced 24 hours in advance so it's actually very easy to this. It's super handy for things like battery-electric vehicles or central heating. For the latter you also take in the weather forecast into your model, and voila, lower power usage, better comfort. For BEV you can easily set plans to charge it even more than usual to take advantage of unusual drops.
My washer and heat-pump dryer don't really use that much electricity. They've become super efficient. There are better and lower hanging fruits than such appliances these days.
I've often wondered why no new manufacturer has appeared with a stacked system that can wash clothes in a top washer and then dump them into a bottom dryer, or even an all-in-one frontloader.
Front-loaded machines with both a washer and heat-pump dryer exists. I've had one for many years. It's quite handy if you have light loads, but I much prefer having a stack of separate washer and dryer, even though it means I have to manually move them from one to the other.
You know I had the vague thought of searching to see if they were actually out there but dismissed it as unlikely (at least in NA) because I've recently been appliance shopping and never saw one in person.
Probably because that would much more mechanically complex and therefore expensive and failure-prone, and the market has decided that the existing options are good enough (I'm not defending this, just describing what I see).
Drying performance is shit. Especially since you can pack a washing-machine fairly full without affecting performance, but a tumble-dryer needs to be loosely filled. But even so, the combo machines don't dry well.
That is an interesting idea. I guess you could probably set that up somehow. Although I’m not sure if you can necessarily access that data live from your electricity company. I imagine you could probably just accomplish the same thing by running at 3am every night.
Depends on the building. The last two apartment buildings I lived in, you could hardly ever hear anything at all from neighbours. One was in a century old building, one was in a completely new building a couple of years back. YMMV.
I’d absolutely pay for some features of a smart washing machine, like a way of telling whether there’s a load currently running. I live in NYC where my building has one (non-commercial) W/D set for ten residents. Climbing up 6 floors with a heavy laundry basket sucks and avoiding wasteful trips would be something I would pay a huge premium for if I could add it on.
Dumb appliances still have firmware on their microcontrollers to control things like wash program, indicators, sensor feedback, you name it. Making a full functioning appliance without the micro would incur huge engineering and BOM costs that can be replaced with a $0.50 micro.
My washing machine displays a remaining time when you start it but is constantly wrong. So you go to the basement to find out it needs 15 more minutes. You go down 20min later and still 5min left. It is very pleasant to know when it is ready without going to the basement
Example of why someone would want to control it remotely: not infrequently, people pay less for energy used between x and y hours that are allocated to them specifically as a customer, or, also not uncommonly, people pay less for energy post-midnight prior to dawn when demand is lower, ergo, they can save a significant amount of money by doing their laundry at 3am.
The above doesn't apply to me specifically, but I would like notifications when my washing is done and thus when I can put another load in. This can be done with energy metering or sensors that attach to washing machines or tumble dryers, but not done it yet myself, but would very much like to.
Me too, and I believe our society could have taken a different trajectory, in which the values you have are norms.
It's normal to want to have control over every detail of where your furniture goes and how your home is decorated, and plants in your garden, without consulting some external source of control. Why isn't it normal to have the same level of control of your appliances and your digital life?
Totally agree. Buying new appliances is hard if you are blind. It's either very cheap stuff that still has buttons, expensive stuff with touch screens which are unusable to me or expensive stuff that has touch screens and an app to control it. Besides not willing to fiddle with a phone and an app for every single action, the expensive stuff with apps will be unusable sooner or later when the software stops getting support and the appliance is still there.
I enjoyed this reverse engineering, using a direct connection within your home network after the keys have been extracted after an initial authorization to the Bosch/Siemens cloud:
https://trmm.net/homeconnect/
a few years ago i bought a bluestar platinum range. that's probably the closest you're going to get these days. it's all gas + mechanical, all stainless and iron, works during a power outage, etc. i looked around and didn't see any PCB's, just wiring for the lights, igniters, and convection fans. the broiler is a gas salamander style top grill.
... it was $6000 for a 30" range but it's more powerful than anything other than commercial gear. you really do have to pay up for simplicity. iirc it was more expensive than the equivalent wolf, viking, etc. and weird european brands like la cornue don't make 30".
most people say they're willing to pay more for this kind of thing, but very, very few people actually do. it's also made in the US, another thing people claim they will pay for, but usually don't.
You've reminded me of a friend of mine who reached the point in his life where he was going to furnish his home with new furniture. He boasted how he was only going to buy American and wasn't going to be like everyone else favoring stuff from elsewhere. After one day of furniture shopping exclusively American, he said he couldn't justify spending so much just to buy American. And I was dumbfounded. Like he honestly believed people weren't buying American-made because they actually favored stuff from China. The thought it was a cost issue never crossed his mind until he had to spend his own money.
That's a fair interpretation. Admittedly I've known him long enough that I'm familiar with these experiences of his, so I didn't probe too much into this exact event and what he thought everyone else was doing.
He also at one point pursued a diet in which he'd eat vegan as long as it was the best option available. And it was just like ... that's almost what literally everyone else does? He seemed to believe most people just ignored certain menu options by default, versus ordering the item that seemed most appealing to them. He thought people looked at a menu and thought "oh, that eggplant vegetable medley sounds amazing! Drat, it doesn't have chicken, guess I'll just get the cheeseburger."
mm hmm. yup. also "justifying" an expense is one of those words i am very skeptical of. you can either afford it, or you can't. fwiw i didn't get the matching fridge, because i couldn't afford both (this was cash out of pocket, not some insane mortgage refi/heloc).
it came down to a choice and the range was more important to me. i did get the awesome matching vent hood though... and learned a lot about sheet metal ducting work because the installers botched that with a half-ass rush job. i got a refund on the install fee.
protip: never schedule installs on a friday afternoon.
I have recently come to the conclusion that a major problem is that there is no "local" internet. You either have websites somewhere out of local network or some app-based solution, but there's no "dishwasher.local". And you can't burden consumers with IP addresses.
There is “local” Internet, it’s called LAN. There’s “dishwater.local” if someone (manufacturer included, though I’m pretty firmly against IoS devices) bothers to set it up. Local nodes can do multicast/broadcast DNS and discover each other. You’ve probably seen it if you ever used a WiFi-connected printer on LAN.
ah I never knew that the protocols behind the zeroconf services (Bonjour etc.) can also resolve hostnames. Very interesting. Although I have to say that in my experience these things are not robust enough yet. Setting up the printer at work was a pain because it was not automatically found (okay, this is a complex network) and at home I have a few devices that should talk with each other (some running behind switches) but only if I start them in the right order.
I wonder why there's no way to let the router handle the DNS with some sort of registering/de-registering functionality? I would think this to be more robust compared to the broadcasting.
I wonder if the Thread/Matter standards will be able to improve on this once adopted. At least they provide open standards and don't require cloud components for supported devices to communicate with your (pocket and otherwise) computers.
> At least they provide open standards and don't require cloud components for supported devices to communicate with your (pocket and otherwise) computers.
Previous standards didn't require this either, and yet every single manufacturer made their devices only work through an internet-connected hub.
For your appliances, maybe look at the commercial market. You usually get minimalism and quality material (lots of stainless steel). Often good reparability, but not much open sourcing I am afraid. And certainly several times the price.
Note that commercial dishwashers are not at all like their consumer counterparts. They don't really wash the dishes, they sanitize them after they have been properly rinsed, and a cycle takes minutes instead of hours.
I've had the same day dream many times, we might be on to something. I even have this "playbook" about parts and branding and stuff, all while encouraging third party creation of spares.
It's hitting a part of the beast (current vendors) they can't defend against, because their sunk costs make it impossible to embrace repair and keep "forever" - tech.
I think we need a big community database website full of instructions for taking control of your appliances. I would take a month off of work to contribute to that and get my devices under my control without needless internet interactions.
Personally, "open source" is very low on the list of things that would convince me to pay several thousands dollars extra per appliance. That's just way too much money for something like "avoid pushing the buttons or getting up without needing third party servers." I'll just push the buttons, thanks.
Even just paying multiple times more for reliability in the forms of quality components is a hard sale. What if I move? Do I want to have to bother trying to take it with me and potentially replacing it for the next buyers? What if a new dishwasher in a decade is as much better than this one as this one is compared to the one I had ten years ago (seems unlikely, but possible?)?
We just got a Bosch oven whose timer would count down to 1:01 and stop. Further, it has two timers and only one of them did this, elevating this bug from surprising to nearly inconceivable. Then, to fix it they had to send a repair person out with an entire new controller board.
So yeah, some fundamental restructuring would be good here. (BTW, to be fair, the controller was made by Diehl Controls, not Bosch.)
Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=migRN4P1wGI. Tape on a thing that gets activated by dumb washing machine LEDs and notifies your phone without any third-party server. Really cool stuff!
I thought this article would be along those lines except more sophisticated (OCR to read remaining time? sure why not!) and was slightly disappointed
I don't think it would be that niche given how big an industry home automation has already become. The general public generally don't know what they want until you put it front of them. I hadn't thought about that for a kitchen appliance, but yes, I would buy one, absolutely, that appeals in a huge way.
If you did start that kind of a company, I'd love to be made aware of it.
I would also like this (well I want something entirely mechanical with no software at all) but short of people designing entirely open and 3d printable versions on their own time, this will never happen.
I was thinking the other day as I was remodeling my kitchen that I would happily pay several times the price of regular appliances (fridge, clothes washer, dish washer) if they were built with a tasteful, minimalist design (eg 1960s Braun style), quality materials, and fully open source PCB/firmware/schematics/etc. I’m probably not the only one. It’d be a weird niche market but perhaps there’s something there.
If you tie it with the building consumer awareness of right to repair, anti consumerism, planned obsolescence, etc, the marketing just writes itself.
Maybe that’s a kind of company I want to start myself, having worked in consumer hardware for a long time and thinking about my next step, but if anyone wants to take the idea go ahead.