10 ms·

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 gues

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.

throwaway290 4y ago
Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=migRN4P1wGI 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
foobarbecue 4y ago
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?
dochtman 4y ago
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.
- illiarian 4y ago
  > 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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  If the device didn't incorporate zigbee, which has been around for years and years now, why would it incorporate Thread/Matter?
inconceivable 4y ago
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.
- fountainofage 4y ago
  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.
  - inconceivable 4y ago
    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.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    > Like he honestly believed people weren't buying American-made because they actually favored stuff from China. Perhaps he imagined American-made carried a 30% price premium over Chinese-made, but instead found it was more of a 300% price premium.
Dragony 4y ago
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.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  > To solve all this they decided to build a cloud API that would resolve all these problems in one go. It solves everything except for the fact that, for people like me, it means we'll never actually give network access to the devices.
  - Schnitz 4y ago
    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.
majormajor 4y ago
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?)?
- davemp 4y ago
  > Even just paying multiple times more for reliability in the forms of quality components is a hard sale. Hard to justify 2-4 the cost when a consumer has no idea if it will last 2-4 times as long (or the warranty will be honored).
davemp 4y ago
> I would happily pay several times the price of regular appliances . . . if they were . . . fully open source PCB/firmware/schematics/etc . . . How willing would you be to pay 1-2 factors less for the Shenzhen clone that hits market 1-2 weeks later based on the same open designs? There's a reason these companies don't exist, you have no competitive edge except good will.
nsxwolf 4y ago
That sounds neat, but pay several times more? I'd have a hard time justifying 10% more for that to my wife.
dzhiurgis 4y ago
> any engineer worth their salt https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Rule #0: > Be kind. Don't be snarky.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
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.
wrs 4y ago
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.)
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
If "engineers worth their salt" would wince at this practice, then who is implementing this "feature" for the manufacturers.
flippinburgers 4y ago
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. Well maybe with ChatGPT 6...
LeanderK 4y ago
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.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS should work fine here
  - LeanderK 4y ago
    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.
- oefrha 4y ago
  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.
thunfischbrot 4y ago
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/ https://trmm.net/homeconnect/
GuB-42 4y ago
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.
bramd 4y ago
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.
actionfromafar 4y ago
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.
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  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.
nonethewiser 4y ago
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.
- j45 4y ago
  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. A basic example: https://efficiencyiseverything.com/water-per-second/ https://efficiencyiseverything.com/water-per-second/
- sokoloff 4y ago
  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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- atyppo 4y ago
  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.
  - illiarian 4y ago
    This is solved by a scheduling system which in its most simple form would be purely mechanical: https://www.thenewbieguide.se/laundry-in-sweden/ https://www.thenewbieguide.se/laundry-in-sweden/

throwaway290 4y ago

Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=migRN4P1wGI 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

foobarbecue 4y ago

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?

dochtman 4y ago

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.

illiarian 4y ago
> 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.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
If the device didn't incorporate zigbee, which has been around for years and years now, why would it incorporate Thread/Matter?

inconceivable 4y ago

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.

fountainofage 4y ago
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.
- inconceivable 4y ago
  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.
- michaelt 4y ago
  > Like he honestly believed people weren't buying American-made because they actually favored stuff from China. Perhaps he imagined American-made carried a 30% price premium over Chinese-made, but instead found it was more of a 300% price premium.

Dragony 4y ago

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.

fatnoah 4y ago
> To solve all this they decided to build a cloud API that would resolve all these problems in one go. It solves everything except for the fact that, for people like me, it means we'll never actually give network access to the devices.
- Schnitz 4y ago
  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.

majormajor 4y ago

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?)?

davemp 4y ago
> Even just paying multiple times more for reliability in the forms of quality components is a hard sale. Hard to justify 2-4 the cost when a consumer has no idea if it will last 2-4 times as long (or the warranty will be honored).

davemp 4y ago

> I would happily pay several times the price of regular appliances . . . if they were . . . fully open source PCB/firmware/schematics/etc . . . How willing would you be to pay 1-2 factors less for the Shenzhen clone that hits market 1-2 weeks later based on the same open designs? There's a reason these companies don't exist, you have no competitive edge except good will.

nsxwolf 4y ago

That sounds neat, but pay several times more? I'd have a hard time justifying 10% more for that to my wife.

dzhiurgis 4y ago

> any engineer worth their salt https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Rule #0: > Be kind. Don't be snarky.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

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.

wrs 4y ago

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.)

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

If "engineers worth their salt" would wince at this practice, then who is implementing this "feature" for the manufacturers.

flippinburgers 4y ago

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. Well maybe with ChatGPT 6...

LeanderK 4y ago

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.

candiddevmike 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS should work fine here
- LeanderK 4y ago
  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.
oefrha 4y ago
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.

thunfischbrot 4y ago

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/ https://trmm.net/homeconnect/

GuB-42 4y ago

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.

bramd 4y ago

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.

actionfromafar 4y ago

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.

foobarbecue 4y ago
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.

nonethewiser 4y ago

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.

j45 4y ago
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. A basic example: https://efficiencyiseverything.com/water-per-second/ https://efficiencyiseverything.com/water-per-second/
sokoloff 4y ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
atyppo 4y ago
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.
- illiarian 4y ago
  This is solved by a scheduling system which in its most simple form would be purely mechanical: https://www.thenewbieguide.se/laundry-in-sweden/ https://www.thenewbieguide.se/laundry-in-sweden/