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I had sort of the opposite situation. I needed a new washer and all the top rated ones according to Consumer Reports included WiFi. I asked at Home Depot if the
by tzs 2y ago
I had sort of the opposite situation. I needed a new washer and all the top rated ones according to Consumer Reports included WiFi. I asked at Home Depot if the one I was thinking of getting, an LG WM3400CW, required me to actually use the WiFi and they said no.
I used it for a few weeks without ever even trying to set up WiFi and everything was fine.
Then I found at that when you set up an LG washer for WiFi you can get reports in the app of water and energy use. I'd actually like that, so decided to give it WiFi access.
I then found out that the WM3400CW does in fact not have WiFi. I think it might be the only current LG washing machine that does not have WiFi.
I suspect that Consumer Reports got confused because it does have LG's "Smart Diagnosis" feature, which gives you diagnostic reports in the LG app.
The way "Smart Diagnosis" in the app works with the WM3400CW is that the washing machine sends the data to the app acoustically. Press the button sequence to start a diagnosis on the washing machine and it sounds very similar to an old analog modem. The app listens to that with your phone's microphone.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- OkGoDoIt 2y agoThat sounds perfect. This needs to go on a list for the next time I need to replace a dishwasher.
- exabrial 2y agoLiterally none of that requires cloud access though to accomplish that task.
- exabrial 2y agoAnd apologies, my frustration isn't directed at you
- sureIy 2y agoThis sounds like great use of technology if you ask me. The only thing I'd complain about is that data would not be E2E encrypted :)
- bee_rider 2y agoSeems like it’d be a good application for Bluetooth.
- Spooky23 2y agoBluetooth modelers don’t age well in these types of environments. Sound is much easier and more reliable.
- UnlockedSecrets 2y agoIn terms of a threat-risk analysis, the need of a physical microphone nearby i imagine more than makes up for the risk of an adversary knowing your water quality and electrical consumption as measured by your washer in almost everyones lives atleast..
- amy_petrik 2y agothe use of customer-central water usage data piques my interest. there's a huge market for selling water and waste data to advertisers and other companies interested in consumer data. This is one of my friend's startups, smartpipes, which is a type of smart sewage pipe - these smart washers remind me of smartpipe (which supports dishwasher waste!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
- mmooss 2y agoIt also indicates when you are home or out, and likely an estimate of how many people live there. It could collect more data. Those pieces of data are combined with others, to form a full picture. This device doesn't need to collect it all itself. Survellance of private citizens is arguably the foundation of the very dangerous problems in societies around the world, taking away freedom, health, peace, and for most, prosperity. When do you stop it?
- tempay 2y agoI think you might have missed OPs point being about acoustically sending data rather than using bluetooth/WiFi. If someone is close enough to your home to listen to your washing machine (or more likely, inside) they can probably hear/see you more directly.
- dorfsmay 2y agoSmart diagnostic sounds good but make it available via Bluetooth or make the dishwasher run a webserver on the local lan. Having to go through their site and their auth means they ultimately control the appliance I paid full price for.
- i2shar 2y agoWhy not just use Bluetooth? I'd be suspicious if the Dishwasher app requested permission to access the phone's microphone
- colechristensen 2y agoYou can implement an audio modem with much dumber hardware and it would be cheaper and less vulnerable to nonsense, especially if all you're sending is a few bytes. Then you also don't need to do FCC certification. Seriously bitbanging an audio modem to broadcast error codes from a $0.20 BOM microcontroller and a little buzzer speaker would be a fun project to give to a summer intern. (If anyone wants to believe a highly falsified resume and would believe I'm 15 years younger, I'd be happy to join your company for the summer :D <sadly not really> )
- floating-io 2y agoIf your hardware has a clock >32Khz, you need FCC certification. It doesn't matter if it deliberately uses radio or not, last I checked.
- varjag 2y agoIntentional radiators have additional certification requirements.
- vasco 2y agoFor energy usage, a metering plug on the same outlet you use is very cheap. For water, just take the bendy pipe and put it onto a big container and see how much water it uses. It shouldn't change much so you do it once. Wifi and the whole cloud for this seems weird.
- schobi 2y agoWouldn't it be great if a universal standard existed for devices sending their diagnosis via audio? If there is a microcontroller and a beeper in there anyway, at only the extra cost of internal memory? Instead of a modem-type modulation and a speaker, make use of the bare minimum piezo beepers and send something that is universally understood? All of that without FCC, no extra hardware cost, no backchannel und thus little security considerations? Yea - I know. Works much better to upsell "wifi enabled" and I'm happy that the appliances only beep rarely.
- TuringTest 2y ago> Yea - I know. Works much better to upsell "wifi enabled" A good marketer could give a catchy name to sell the advantages of that system too. Top of my head I can think of "near-fi", but certainly could be done better.
- rightbyte 2y ago"Spyware and asbestos free"
- account42 2y ago* still full of adware and lead though
- RandomBacon 2y agoSpyware, and asbestos free! ("Sugar, Free Donuts" - The Simpsons)
- RandomBacon 2y agoD'oh! I realize now, I should have wrote it as: Spyware and asbestos, free!
- rightbyte 2y agoHeh ye was trying and failed to get the original joke.
- squigz 2y ago> The way "Smart Diagnosis" in the app works with the WM3400CW is that the washing machine sends the data to the app acoustically. Press the button sequence to start a diagnosis on the washing machine and it sounds very similar to an old analog modem. The app listens to that with your phone's microphone. This sounds far, far better to me - and just goes to show it's not necessary for everything to be connected to the Internet...
- culturestate 2y ago> The way "Smart Diagnosis" in the app works with the WM3400CW is that the washing machine sends the data to the app acoustically. My LG microwave has this too; it wasn't a selling point for me, but I thought it was a nice compromise by their engineers and product team.
- 7thaccount 2y agoAcoustically? That's pretty neat and seems a lot less invasive, while still being useful.