6 ms·

I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder whe

I just want normal buttons and dials back. Not time-based capacitance buttons that take 5.02 seconds to activate, not 5.0 seconds; nor free-spinning encoder wheels that mandate you give it a jiggle before the washer does anything, even if it's already on the setting you want. I want kachunk-a-chunk back first. Then we can decide if it needs smarts.

andsoitis 1y ago
Can we keep the happy sunshiny tune it plays when it completes the job?
- Lio 1y ago
  No. That was the first thing I disabled on my washing machine. I want it to be less intrusive and irritating not more.
  - exe34 1y ago
    was this a UI option or did you have to fix it with wire cutters? mine is mildly irritating.
    - NaomiLehman 1y ago
      had to reverse engineer the circuit board
    - Lio 1y ago
      Joking aside, for my old LG washer/dryer there was some kind of baroque incantation buried in user manual to turn the sound.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    Genuine people personalities /s
- anal_reactor 1y ago
  Mine doesn't have one and that's it worst drawback
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
I recommend Speed Queen.
exe34 1y ago
my microwave oven has two knobs: how hot and how long. I paid an extra £50 to get a model of fridge without WiFi. sadly my washing machine is already at the free-spinning encoder stage - I don't hate it with a passion, but more of a low-enthusiasm. I dread replacing anything that breaks in the next few years.
- zbendefy 1y ago
  Why not get the wifi enabled fridge and just not hook it up to your router? Genuinely asking because I plan to do this once I have to get new appliances, is there something missing that way?
  - ssl-3 1y ago
    Why not buy the fridge that doesn't have wifi smarts to begin with? If I want to monitor my fridge's temperature, I can buy a widget that does that for a dozen or so dollars and have that sensor talk to the home automation system of my choice. And when the fridge dies or otherwise gets replaced, I can move the sensor to the new fridge. (And when a new sensor comes out that I like better, I can spend another McDonald's Value Meal worth of money to use that instead.) Besides: We here on HN should all have a certain amount of distrust for devices that self-report problems. This distrust is part of the reason why ZFS doesn't trust hard drives to self-report issues and does its own checksums instead. --- But that's a general rant. To answer your question more-directly, if somewhat-tangentially: One of the popular open-source-oriented YouTube dudes (Jeff Geerling?) recently bought a dishwasher that had functional modes that could not be accessed without a wifi connection to The Clown. And that's... that's not good: In order to be able to use the functions that the thing natively includes, one must always allow it to call home to mother.
  - quitit 1y ago
    My folks have one of these: it bitches at you for internet. Also the device is generally designed with internet in mind, so certain local-only functions don’t work properly without internet.
  - exe34 1y ago
ssl-3 1y ago
The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive. They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them. But one cool part about things like motorized kerchunk-a-wheels is that, upon failure, a motivated person on Gilligan's Island can often mend them back into service with a screwdriver and a sharp rock.
- oliwarner 1y ago
  But these are [often] thousand dollar appliances. "Capacitive buttons are cheaper" shouldn't be a factor. It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.
  - ssl-3 1y ago
    It's not just the buttons themselves (in a capacitive-vs-mechanical sense) -- it's also warranty services. When the electronicals are bottled up behind a sheet of glass or Perspex or whatever, then: They tend to last longer because their operating environment becomes less hazardous to them. Exact hourly rates vary too much to write about specifics, but whatever they are: Sending a tech out to look at a thing costs real money (in the ballpark of hundreds of dollars, not dozens) that really bites into profit margin of any individual unit sale. It bites into the margin even if the root problem is that the owner's roommate's friend pissed into the control panel with a head full of acid. They'll still be paying someone to physically go out and make that determination. So if mush-buttons generate fewer service calls than push-buttons do, then: It's a big advantage to a manufacturer. So... I think it's quite easy to understand how we got to where we are: Fewer moving parts + better environmental isolation for those parts = less after-sale risk. (I don't necessarily like it, but there's lots of other things in the world that make good financial sense at the manufacturing level that I'm also not fond of. I can accept this reality without also pretending that it can't make sense for someone, somewhere. Good answers? Speed Queen, for one, still makes good washers with real knobs and real buttons, for the consumer who favors these features. Just add a smart plug or current monitoring and an iteration of Home Assistant or whatever running on a sleepy little Raspberry Pi or a VM/container or something to detect and notify soon after the wash is done. End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway. And that may sound convoluted, but these are smarts that you control yourself and are about as open-source as anyone may wish them to be. (I don't want an appliance that I hope to last for 20 years or more to be connected to any networks at all: "Wake up, babe; new rootkit just dropped and our clothes washer is fucked" isn't a meme that I want to live through, even if it does have a nice API running on a stack that was last updated in [checks calendar] 2005.))
avhception 1y ago
My parent's new washing machine doesn't have a real indicator of position on the selector wheel. The wheel has a chrome-like band going around it. Somewhere in that band is a light-grey stripe. It's barely visible from the side even if you look very closely. It's completely invisible when simply looking at the machine from a normal perspective. Who the hell approved that design?! I have drawn a big black mark on the wheel with a sharpie.
NaomiLehman 1y ago
hey, AI needs to reinforce-learn everything about your dirty laundry
nebula8804 1y ago
Speed Queen is an American brand that tries to differentiate itself with quality and simplicity: [1]: https://speedqueen.com/products/top-load-washers/tc5003wn/ https://speedqueen.com/products/top-load-washers/tc5003wn/
burgerrito 1y ago
Capacitive buttons are very inaccessible it's honestly need to be a crime to be making such appliances I feel very sorry for the visually impaired that are looking for house appliances in this decade
- quitit 1y ago
  I discovered they are also dangerous: My former cook top was solely driven by capacitance buttons - which became entirely inaccessible the moment there was an overflow, leading to more overflows and a situation that rapidly got out of hand. The first step in an emergency is switch off the cook top - luckily the breaker switch was nearby.
- lesostep 1y ago
  My grandma lost her vision when she was young. Even before capacitive buttons, buttons were very hard to find by touch. It has been an issue for more then a decade. Off topic, but a lifehack for those who have visually impaired loved ones: we use glass paint contour paste on the center of buttons. It's basically used in glass paintings to stop paint sliding from the glass, so it can make a good noticeable bump or line. But – it only works on hard surfaces and if the buttons themselves are not very sensitive. If you can lightly brush the button while you are "looking" for bumps, then it works.
ponector 1y ago
>> I just want normal buttons and dials back There are washing machines without any screens, just old buttons. Also they are cheaper, I can see now in the store for just €270. But looks like many people wants screens, apps and happily pay extra for washing machine with extra features.
- FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
  Do people really want them, or is that what is offered and do most people just buy whatever they see in a store or on the first page of a retailer online? We keep pretending that everything that companies do is because consumers want it, but we ignore the part where companies do certain things because its better for them. Like a washing machine that uses 4 gig of data a day, or a washing machine that needs access to you photos????
  - ponector 1y ago
    Obviously they don't say it will spy on you. But "innovative design with AI app" with price tag €1000 is there along with old style €300 washer with knobs. Many people rather buy new shiny thing than old style cheap item.
potato3732842 1y ago
Most low end appliances have buttons and dials as the interface to the "will last long enough to not be available when it breaks" computer that the fancy touchscreen stuff uses.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  "Most". I do not think that word means what you think it does.
rsynnott 1y ago
If you're talking about the motorised control wheel things that old washing machines used to have, they went away largely because they are failure prone, and their failure modes can be bad (for instance in some machines if they fail while the machine is filling, well, it will just go on filling forever). The microcontrollers in modern machines can fail, to, but generally are easier to make fail safe.
snapplebobapple 1y ago
As has been said already those can fail nuclear disaster style so I have no interest in having those back. Give me an ethernet port and a wifi interface (ideally supporting at least wifi 6 but ideally wifi 7 so it's not polluting the airwaves causing interference. It should also be able to be disabled if I want to use ethernet only) that has a locked down web interface exposed on one port with some standardized interface (is rest still what all the cool kids are using?) that exposes all the machine functions and lets me configure access credentials. The apps are spyware garbage that I'm sure are fine for some people but with local polling I can integrate this stuff into my home assistant setup and do all I would ever want with it and block the machine's external access. All these commodity manufacturers of household goods are trying to lock us into their software walled gardens to rip us off more/sell our information to advertisers and governments and that needs to be aggressively stopped imo.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Your primary concern is "Will my washer work after a nuclear strike?" ?
  - snapplebobapple 1y ago
    That is a turn a phrase. It means catastrophically. Like fill your whole house with water catastrophically

andsoitis 1y ago

Can we keep the happy sunshiny tune it plays when it completes the job?

Lio 1y ago
No. That was the first thing I disabled on my washing machine. I want it to be less intrusive and irritating not more.
- exe34 1y ago
  was this a UI option or did you have to fix it with wire cutters? mine is mildly irritating.
  - NaomiLehman 1y ago
    had to reverse engineer the circuit board
  - Lio 1y ago
    Joking aside, for my old LG washer/dryer there was some kind of baroque incantation buried in user manual to turn the sound.
- hulitu 1y ago
  Genuine people personalities /s
anal_reactor 1y ago
Mine doesn't have one and that's it worst drawback

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago

I recommend Speed Queen.

exe34 1y ago

my microwave oven has two knobs: how hot and how long. I paid an extra £50 to get a model of fridge without WiFi. sadly my washing machine is already at the free-spinning encoder stage - I don't hate it with a passion, but more of a low-enthusiasm. I dread replacing anything that breaks in the next few years.

zbendefy 1y ago
Why not get the wifi enabled fridge and just not hook it up to your router? Genuinely asking because I plan to do this once I have to get new appliances, is there something missing that way?
- ssl-3 1y ago
  Why not buy the fridge that doesn't have wifi smarts to begin with? If I want to monitor my fridge's temperature, I can buy a widget that does that for a dozen or so dollars and have that sensor talk to the home automation system of my choice. And when the fridge dies or otherwise gets replaced, I can move the sensor to the new fridge. (And when a new sensor comes out that I like better, I can spend another McDonald's Value Meal worth of money to use that instead.) Besides: We here on HN should all have a certain amount of distrust for devices that self-report problems. This distrust is part of the reason why ZFS doesn't trust hard drives to self-report issues and does its own checksums instead. --- But that's a general rant. To answer your question more-directly, if somewhat-tangentially: One of the popular open-source-oriented YouTube dudes (Jeff Geerling?) recently bought a dishwasher that had functional modes that could not be accessed without a wifi connection to The Clown. And that's... that's not good: In order to be able to use the functions that the thing natively includes, one must always allow it to call home to mother.
- quitit 1y ago
  My folks have one of these: it bitches at you for internet. Also the device is generally designed with internet in mind, so certain local-only functions don’t work properly without internet.
- exe34 1y ago

ssl-3 1y ago

The problem with kerchunk-a-wheels and real pushbuttons (and the not-smarts they imply) is that they're expensive. They're more expensive (and more failure-prone) than the rotary encoders, mush-buttons, and brain-boxes that replaced them. But one cool part about things like motorized kerchunk-a-wheels is that, upon failure, a motivated person on Gilligan's Island can often mend them back into service with a screwdriver and a sharp rock.

oliwarner 1y ago
But these are [often] thousand dollar appliances. "Capacitive buttons are cheaper" shouldn't be a factor. It's hard to understand why companies can't build things to last, use real buttons, provide parts for servicing at cost, add local APIs for anything "smart", forgo any secondary income streams (eg screens showing ads), and still make a profit.
- ssl-3 1y ago
  It's not just the buttons themselves (in a capacitive-vs-mechanical sense) -- it's also warranty services. When the electronicals are bottled up behind a sheet of glass or Perspex or whatever, then: They tend to last longer because their operating environment becomes less hazardous to them. Exact hourly rates vary too much to write about specifics, but whatever they are: Sending a tech out to look at a thing costs real money (in the ballpark of hundreds of dollars, not dozens) that really bites into profit margin of any individual unit sale. It bites into the margin even if the root problem is that the owner's roommate's friend pissed into the control panel with a head full of acid. They'll still be paying someone to physically go out and make that determination. So if mush-buttons generate fewer service calls than push-buttons do, then: It's a big advantage to a manufacturer. So... I think it's quite easy to understand how we got to where we are: Fewer moving parts + better environmental isolation for those parts = less after-sale risk. (I don't necessarily like it, but there's lots of other things in the world that make good financial sense at the manufacturing level that I'm also not fond of. I can accept this reality without also pretending that it can't make sense for someone, somewhere. Good answers? Speed Queen, for one, still makes good washers with real knobs and real buttons, for the consumer who favors these features. Just add a smart plug or current monitoring and an iteration of Home Assistant or whatever running on a sleepy little Raspberry Pi or a VM/container or something to detect and notify soon after the wash is done. End-of-cycle detection is really all that is ever needed for smarts anyway. And that may sound convoluted, but these are smarts that you control yourself and are about as open-source as anyone may wish them to be. (I don't want an appliance that I hope to last for 20 years or more to be connected to any networks at all: "Wake up, babe; new rootkit just dropped and our clothes washer is fucked" isn't a meme that I want to live through, even if it does have a nice API running on a stack that was last updated in [checks calendar] 2005.))

avhception 1y ago

My parent's new washing machine doesn't have a real indicator of position on the selector wheel. The wheel has a chrome-like band going around it. Somewhere in that band is a light-grey stripe. It's barely visible from the side even if you look very closely. It's completely invisible when simply looking at the machine from a normal perspective. Who the hell approved that design?! I have drawn a big black mark on the wheel with a sharpie.

NaomiLehman 1y ago

hey, AI needs to reinforce-learn everything about your dirty laundry

nebula8804 1y ago

Speed Queen is an American brand that tries to differentiate itself with quality and simplicity: [1]: https://speedqueen.com/products/top-load-washers/tc5003wn/ https://speedqueen.com/products/top-load-washers/tc5003wn/

burgerrito 1y ago

Capacitive buttons are very inaccessible it's honestly need to be a crime to be making such appliances I feel very sorry for the visually impaired that are looking for house appliances in this decade

quitit 1y ago
I discovered they are also dangerous: My former cook top was solely driven by capacitance buttons - which became entirely inaccessible the moment there was an overflow, leading to more overflows and a situation that rapidly got out of hand. The first step in an emergency is switch off the cook top - luckily the breaker switch was nearby.
lesostep 1y ago
My grandma lost her vision when she was young. Even before capacitive buttons, buttons were very hard to find by touch. It has been an issue for more then a decade. Off topic, but a lifehack for those who have visually impaired loved ones: we use glass paint contour paste on the center of buttons. It's basically used in glass paintings to stop paint sliding from the glass, so it can make a good noticeable bump or line. But – it only works on hard surfaces and if the buttons themselves are not very sensitive. If you can lightly brush the button while you are "looking" for bumps, then it works.

ponector 1y ago

>> I just want normal buttons and dials back There are washing machines without any screens, just old buttons. Also they are cheaper, I can see now in the store for just €270. But looks like many people wants screens, apps and happily pay extra for washing machine with extra features.

FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
Do people really want them, or is that what is offered and do most people just buy whatever they see in a store or on the first page of a retailer online? We keep pretending that everything that companies do is because consumers want it, but we ignore the part where companies do certain things because its better for them. Like a washing machine that uses 4 gig of data a day, or a washing machine that needs access to you photos????
- ponector 1y ago
  Obviously they don't say it will spy on you. But "innovative design with AI app" with price tag €1000 is there along with old style €300 washer with knobs. Many people rather buy new shiny thing than old style cheap item.

potato3732842 1y ago

Most low end appliances have buttons and dials as the interface to the "will last long enough to not be available when it breaks" computer that the fancy touchscreen stuff uses.

IAmBroom 1y ago
"Most". I do not think that word means what you think it does.

rsynnott 1y ago

If you're talking about the motorised control wheel things that old washing machines used to have, they went away largely because they are failure prone, and their failure modes can be bad (for instance in some machines if they fail while the machine is filling, well, it will just go on filling forever). The microcontrollers in modern machines can fail, to, but generally are easier to make fail safe.

snapplebobapple 1y ago

As has been said already those can fail nuclear disaster style so I have no interest in having those back. Give me an ethernet port and a wifi interface (ideally supporting at least wifi 6 but ideally wifi 7 so it's not polluting the airwaves causing interference. It should also be able to be disabled if I want to use ethernet only) that has a locked down web interface exposed on one port with some standardized interface (is rest still what all the cool kids are using?) that exposes all the machine functions and lets me configure access credentials. The apps are spyware garbage that I'm sure are fine for some people but with local polling I can integrate this stuff into my home assistant setup and do all I would ever want with it and block the machine's external access. All these commodity manufacturers of household goods are trying to lock us into their software walled gardens to rip us off more/sell our information to advertisers and governments and that needs to be aggressively stopped imo.

IAmBroom 1y ago
Your primary concern is "Will my washer work after a nuclear strike?" ?
- snapplebobapple 1y ago
  That is a turn a phrase. It means catastrophically. Like fill your whole house with water catastrophically