I was notified by Samsung that my new washing machine had a recall because the control module could overheat and a firmware fix would prevent any damage. It required me to download the Samsung Smart Things App to my phone, create a Samsung account, connect my washing machine to my WiFi using the app and wait for the washer to decide to download the firmware fix.
Connecting a washing machine to the WiFi/Internet made me feel slimy.
1. There is too much "Create an account" and "Give us your info" and "agree to these 300 pages of TOS"
2. We want our appliances to work for us rather than for data brokers
Now if my washing machine had a web server built in and I could log into it to see the status of the machine (spin cycle, rinse, finished 22 minutes ago) I would like that. In fact, if the smarts on the washing machine didn't phone home without asking me first I might even join it to my home network. But as long as the terms are that I must accept an electronic leash up my ass from the manufacturer with little say in what info they collect or to whom they give it if I want to see the status of my machine remotely then they can get stuffed.
3. We want our appliances to work until they break down - not until the company updates the software so they break down faster (or instantly [for our safety of course]) so we need to buy a new appliance.
4. We want schematics, details, and parts availability to fix things ourselves (or for our local independent repair person to do it) rather than grovel for a tech who paid the manufacturer for the label of "brand certified" to come overcharge me for a fix that won't really fix the issue completely.
There's an entire line of Whirlpool/Amana/Roper washers that all have 5-7 LED lights under the cycle selector knob and are top-loader washers. If you push the drum of these washers toward the cycle selector panel you can reach down on the left side and pull a service manual out that gives you instructions on how to access a troubleshooting menu in the control board, plus electronics schematics and strip circuits to simplify troubleshooting when parts go out. They're very simple and all use some combination of a main motor to agitate and spin, a drain motor, a "run capacitor" to smooth out power, and a shifter to change from agitate to spin, and a pressure transducer either in the water level selector or built in to the main PCB depending on whether it has auto-sense.
They're ridiculously easy to work on and you can buy parts for them off PartSelect.com. The most common issues are that a relay on the control board goes out or the suspension wears out. Both are easy to diagnose.
I noticed when I was delivering and installing appliances that many have a service manual tucked away somewhere with similar information. Ranges were typically taped on the back somewhere, I can't remember where the other appliances stashed them.
The delivery people or service techs from the appliance store sometimes steal these documents. Probably to make sure the owner has to call the store for service. When I opened my wife's washing machine to repair it the manual was missing and I had to find it online. It was brand new so someone from the store or warehouse probably stole the document.
Far down my todo list is to rehab an old washing machine I have sitting around that was said to have a "bad control board". Rather than buying another proprietary control board that always seem to somehow go "bad", my plan is to find or create a generic control board that handles driving the hardware and runs the state machine, and talks via serial to an ESP32 for local-control MQTT integration.
I feel like retrofitting older appliances might be the way forward, whether preemptively or as part of a repair. Although I do admit there are benefits to modern brushless drives (etc), that would be hard to design a generic control board for.
Although recently having gotten a tiny bit of experience with off the shelf PLCs, going that way might be the right answer rather than reinventing the wheel.
I lost the control board on a very simple electric stove, 4 pots for the stove top, 1 control for the oven, and a display with 2-3 LEDS and a display that showed either the time or the temp.
Looked very simple. Had a relay for the oven and 2 temp sensors. One for controlling the oven, and another to shut everything down if the temp outside the oven got too hot.
I do wonder how many types of these boards would be required to fit the common appliance types.
The oldest automated appliances were just complex mechanical timers sequencing various things on and off, and appliances haven't advanced that much. On/off motors, solenoids, sensors, and some series limit switches.
Probably the biggest new difference I've seen is brushless motors with variable frequency drives, which requires its own power control electronics and probably some calibrations.
So in my estimation not very many. Packaging it all up in a way that an appliance tech could be comfortable installing would be the hard part.
Is this something we engineers could create an online space for - eg 'repairWiki' - where we jailbreak appliance controls in an open-source kinda way? Would this run afoul of the law, or just Big Appliance?
Well, I'm not talking about "jailbreaking" (loading one's own software that perhaps may involve defeating treacherous computing measures), but rather wholesale replacement of the control board with a generic open one. That you're wondering if this might be illegal shows just how far manufacturers have succeeded in separating us from the idea of modifying things we own.
Documentation would be fantastic, but it feels like a curation/discovery problem. After a bunch of deep searching, you can usually find a forum where people are discussing various lines of machines at a higher level, what features they have, repairability, etc. Parts websites generally have diagrams and whatnot (no idea where these come from or what it takes to get access to it wholesale). You can usually figure out cross reference part numbers from pouring through eBay/Amazon listings. And sometimes you even stumble onto a wiki or something where someone has documented a specific machine tangential to another project (eg Home Assistant).
Gathering it all up in one place to be useful, especially in a way so people will contribute their findings back so it can be self-sustaining, seems like the hard problem to me.
I have Bosch and Siemens appliances and they are quite repairable? I fix some of the things myself and for some others I call a technician, and usually the fix is simple and involves replacing a moderate number of parts.
I do about an appliance repair a year across my house and both of our parents' houses. I've literally never found parts or information availability to be a barrier to doing these repairs.
HN was complaining about appliances a couple weeks ago, I think it started about TVs, and somebody confidently posted a link to Miele's washer/dryers-that they would last 25years no problem, and I clicked through... it was all touch screens and mielehome their smart platform. Like, maybe their motors will out last me but I do not trust any web service to last the end of a given calendar year.
Forgive me, I need a rant. My fury with Miele knows no bounds, and has consumed (parts of) the past two years of my life. We went all-in with Miele because of their marketing around long-lasting products, purchasing a dishwasher and a (hella expensive) multi-fuel (gas/electric) range and oven. The dishwasher is a generally solid product, however, after a few years of heavy use — we work from home and cook a ton — it's making gradually-loudening grinding noises. The range has been a garbage fire since day one, with a cascade of problems.
I'm sitting on $8k worth of rather new appliances that I am unable to repair in any fashion. When we bought them from a local appliance store — we live in a rural New England state — they were Miele-certified. Then they outsourced that certification to a local appliance-repair technician. Then Miele revoked the certification, or otherwise is no longer providing it, to that appliance-repair technician.
My appliances are broken. I call the place I bought it: they punt me to their repair technician. That repair technician is outright hostile and hates Miele and says they never call him back and he's not certified anymore. I call Miele. They punt me to "regional dispatch," which then ends up punting me behind the scenes back to the place I bought the appliances from, which doesn't ever call me back. I keep trying to push further, but all I get from Miele is that there are no certified technicians within X miles of me. This cycle has repeated 8 or 10 times.
The part I believe we need to fix the dishwasher is >$500 non-wholesale, so that is too expensive of a risk to take if it's not what will fix it. No non-certified appliance repair techs in the area (thin on the ground in general) will touch Miele products.
So I am literally waiting for them to stop working and then I guess I'll throw them away?
One of these days I'll generate the gumption to, I dunno, send a letter to Miele HQ or something?
> I could log into it to see the status of the machine (spin cycle, rinse, finished 22 minutes ago) I would like that
As long as this monitoring system can completely fail, and the machine still works, I'm okay with it. Ultimately, the more shit like this that gets shoved into appliances, the more the cost climbs. And, If I had to guess, actual functionality (eg. washing my clothes) is the target of cost cutting measures. Which is precisely what I don't want in an appliance.
And that nice and handy remote update that either disables a bunch of stuff that you already paid for or that bricks a perfectly good piece of hardware if the company goes out of business.
Google supporting the standard is irrelevant so long as Home Assistant does. More devices in the eco system at the beginning is a plus for the health of the standard, just don't buy one of their listening devices
Google might be pretty much okay only capturing the 99.99% of people who don't think about privacy much, and want the convenience of Google Home and centralized data. Giving a slight nod to the 0.01% might even lead to a decrease in bad PR.
I use a zigbee smart outlet to monitor the power usage (I have a gas dryer so easier to do than something on 220) and use that to notify when the washer/dryer are done.
I do something like if power usage goes above x, then wait till it goes below that for at least 3 minutes and notify me then (exact timing may depend on the washer/dryer)
I do the same with my washer. 100W threshold to know it's running and then has to be below 5W for 3 minutes to be done. ntfy.sh alert is then sent to whoever is home (or just me if nobody is home).
A robot vacuum requiring Wifi connection to work with dual HD camera on it and making accurate map of my entire home and proud of having internet access will not only keep me away connecting it to my home Wifi - with devices having sensitive data on - but from buying such device. It happened. I did not find acceptable offline one so I keep vacuuming manually.
I got a pair of Dreame W10s in the last Black Friday deals and they're a great help.
I wish my money wouldn't go towards the vendor crapware that takes extra efforts to get rid of.
But i couldn't be happier with the result, having automated the vacuuming and mopping.
Appliance makers can't seem to resist trying to push you into an "ecosystem" that they own rather than allow you to use open standards, and its super frustrating. I suspect a lot of their internal dev teams think they're adding value and delivering customer-centric features, but they're actually pretty customer-hostile by trying to trap us.
Note to makers of "smart" appliances: if you want my business then support standard Zigbee or ZWave hubs.
Most of these devices support Google Home, which isn't ideal, but it does allow cross manufacturer compatibility. There's probably just not much demand for open standards because Home is good enough, up until they take the cloud server down.
> Now if my washing machine had a web server built in and I could log into it to see the status of the machine (spin cycle, rinse, finished 22 minutes ago) I would like that.
How big is your house? And why do you need to know when the cycle is finished?
I absolutely do not want a so-called "smart" appliance and will go out of my way not to buy one. I want something with as few buttons as possible, that promises to last a long time.
Not the original poster... but wanted to answer anyway.
I have ADHD, my washer sending a push notification to my iOS devices (I have LG ThinQ enabled washer/dryer) means I have an alert in a place where I am already looking for alerts that my washing machine is done and I should go move the clothes into the dryer.
Before I enabled push notifications for this, my laundry could sometimes sit in the washer for days, getting all nasty and moldy and needing another cycle to be run just to get them clean before throwing them into the dryer.
That is why I need to know that the cycle is finished.
Exactly, I have a LG washer that has a smart feature. But it works by the machine connecting to an LG server, and then their smartphone app connecting to the LG server, and matching up. Needless to say I have never connected it.
Why can't they just run a local webserver or API? I'd use that. Even more if it was a documented API and I could write my own automation for it.
At first, I got excited about IOT showing up and the possibilities. I could automate everything ! Smart lights, smart TV, smart fridge, smart washing machine, smart toaster, smart coffee machine, smart switch, smart plugs, smart lock, smart speaker, smart photo frame .... I spent months, interconnected everything, it felt awesome. Till it didn't.
Few years in, I realized what a lie, a mirage it all has been! I bought them to make my life easier, it did the reverse (with some very rare exceptions). I just kept seeing weird bugs, random forced updates, missed schedules, firmware issues, interoperability issues.
Then, I started seeing ads in physical mail, emails, even phone calls for new or renewing subscriptions. Real creepy stuff. All this to monitor usage and sell me more stuff ! I pulled the plug, dialed back on everything smart. I then realized I had a hard time getting my hands on products that get the job done and don't force me to connect it to the internet.
I'm now monitoring my router logs for weird activity, locking products down and actively figuring out ways to firewall them.
Better for manufacturers to focus on clear, multichannel product registration, error messages that can be decoded and referenced online, and provide a usb port if necessary for updates.
All while not giving out information relevant to independent repair shops or those who want to service their own appliances. We no longer own anything, we merely lease it from the manufacturer.
A work-from-home colleague just lost a work day or two when the manufacturer of his home wi-fi network reached down from the cloud, silently updated the firmware, and introduced flakiness in the process.
Imagine that happening to your washing machine, or stove, or fridge. By malice or incompetence, the invisible hand of the cloud reaching down and making a device work differently than you're used to. No thanks.
But an easy fix for those recalcitrant 50% like me. Just make the device refuse to function at all unless it has (recent) internet connectivity. Problem solved.
Yeah. 50% won't voluntarily connect. Maybe 25% will return for refund instead of connect. (And maybe 10% don't even have internet, and aren't going to get it for a washing machine...)
Care to list the brand (model)? That seems insane to me. Firmware upgrades should be deliberate, and done with caution (hopefully starting with a backup).
Any update should be deliberate. Windows will now just update it self without asking over night. I often wake up, and see that my PC laptop has rebooted into Linux since that’s at the top in the bootloader.
Eh I think that is honestly just not true with regards to Windows, sorry. There are like 1.5 billion computers running it. Them forcing updates is simply the best procedure because we live in a world full of complete asshats that want to create chaos and do malicious shit. The average person would never update their computers "deliberately" if that was the default.
It's simply the lesser of all evils to ensure people are relatively up to date on security.
I don't really like it either, but I understand it completely.
There's a massive difference between a completely silent update and the more common "Update available, install now Y/N?"
Apple, MS, etc should do the second. Even with a "do it now, or within 7 days, or we do it for you." Same for the router.
For goods that have safety implications (cars), the updates should NEVER be silent. And probably need a long notification period with a detailed "What's New".
Maybe give me a day? I absolutely don't want my laptop updating/rebooting while I'm in the middle of work. I understand the need to keep up to date for security reasons, but at some point, I just need my device to work without interruption.
Have the press make noise about it. This has happened a few times with i devices and intel cpus. I shouldn’t have to fight my computer to stop it from upgrading itself to Windows 11
Maybe there is some justification for Microsoft's design decision, but two undesirable side effects are that:
1. It angers power users who want their computer to retain their workspace's context, which is often easily lost between reboots.
2. It reduces Windows' usefulness as an OS on which to set up and run long-term processes, especially ones with real-time sensitivity, since Windows may decide to reboot itself at some unpredictable point in the process.
Haha yes, I only got a recent windows license 2 years ago when I was forced to get a new machine. There was no, “I don’t want windows” option. So I got it and just dual boot.
It's part of the DOCSIS standard. Users are not allowed to modify/update the firmware on a DOCSIS modem because that could potentially be used to unlock additional speed outside of the users paid for speeds due to the way that the standard does bandwidth limiting on the modem instead of further upstream.
That is why ISPs have lists of cable modems that are certified for their networks, and thus the ones allowed to connect to them as that is the list they have firmware updates for.
my eero pro does this. about once a month it will decide to update itself around two in the morning without any prompt, notification, or any way to defer or delay. there is no option to adjust update times. you can check the app manually and install available updates, but if you don’t do this within a certain amount of time, it will do it automatically within a few days.
three times now i have been up late working on a project and it has kicked me offline to update. it’s so goddamned annoying. i wouldn’t have bought this router if i’d known it did this. (i also had to call them on the phone to get a custom ip range enabled on it, which, for a “pro” product, is just ridiculous).
> Firmware upgrades should be deliberate, and done with caution (hopefully starting with a backup).
Many, many, devices don't allow firmware downgrades, on purpose.
On the extreme end, Microsoft spent a huge amount of development effort to forbid that on the hardware level. I con't find the Xbox 360 link right now, but here's a Nintendo Switch one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23534793
I had a solar inverter mfgr destroy ~$20k in batteries through a unannounced irregular remote update (that was defective) after I inadvertently left open the firewall rule that lets their monitoring platform talk to the inverter after temporarily using it. Had I known there was an update I could and likely would have caught the issue before it had a chance to over discharge the batteries, so the unauthorized remote upgrade was a causative factor-- and not just the fact that the upgrade was defective.
My cable modem, which I own, is installed in a difficult to access location due to my lack of desire to run coax between buildings. In the summer every couple months it has to be rebooted when it loses lock and can't regain it on its own. I used to have a cronjob that would automatically handle it, until comcast without my authorization reached inside my property and applied a change to completely remove the ability to remotely reboot it. The remote reboot stuff was XSS vulnerable, so customers whos client PCs could access the cable modem could have had websites randomly rebooting it on them. This wasn't a problem for me, and could have been fixed by eliminating the XSS vulnerability instead.
Screw giving remote access to third parties.
So I think I'm pretty much 2 for 2 in terms of devices allowed remote access ending up screwing me over because of it. I can only imagine how many additional problems I would have had if I wasn't diligent in preventing any kind of remote access and avoiding having internet connected devices in the first place.
Solaredge. I didn't even know their monitoring system could push firmware-- every prior update done had been via a SD card. It was taken care of but geesh, and left me without batteries for about a year due to parts shortages.
I wouldn't use their product again for anything involving energy storage. Solar only it seems to be fine.
I call this "a deliberate RCE vulnerability" because that's what it is in essence — someone else running arbitrary code on your own device without your consent.
For quite a while I suspected that my ISP was pushing flaky updates to my cable modem as my internet would randomly drop until I rebooted it. My solution was to wire it into an esp8266 relay and program my home automation to power cycle it if the internet went down for more than a few minutes. Thankfully, they seem to have gotten their act together; the automation hasn’t triggered since September.
I just don't buy into the connected-to-manufacturer iot silliness.
But I was bit in by this in another way. This happened with an AT&T dsl modem I had years ago. AT&T pushed an update and then my network stopped working. I had static ip addresses and all of a sudden I got no traffic. I went round and round and because the static ip devices were not their equipment, and I could connect out (on their dynamic ip) they washed their hands of it. What a mess.
(I had to delve into the internal router logs, and eventually figured out the pace 5268ac modem had a bug. even though the firewall was DISABLED, packets were blocked unless I enabled firewall "stealth mode")
My Samsung phone has begun offering to pair with washers and dryers in various fast food restaurants I visit. After the third or fourth time, I decided to have fun and accept, but sadly it seems I need to have physical access to complete the process :(
Yes. Believe it or not, getting certified for a number of standards in the IoT world require some proof that you have access to the device in order to pair with it. This is often something like a button press during the process, but a unique qr code on the device itself can also suffice for some standards.
My neighbours have accidentally paired with my bluetooth soundbar on a number of occasions.
(Fun - if legally dubious - halloween prank: put a load of spooky sound effects on your phone, then wander around town looking for unsecured bluetooth soundbars!)
Is there any industry segment where vendors have converged to a common interface for their business customers to configure devices and receive appliance telemetry for private use? How does telemetry data ownership work in regulated industries like airplanes?
If there are no commercial precedents, are there open-source firmware or hardware IoT devices setting a good example?
Smart stove internet remotely activate your stove so you can boil water before you arrive home given you have the a pot of water on the correct stove , no thanks.
I actually want a different interface to our induction hob. The magnetic twiddly knob is all very clean-linesy; it's just a bit shit. I want an array of actual buttons. If the manufacturer won't provide me with one, then give me an API so I can make one. But no, they won't surrender any control, so you don't really have a smart anything; instead to have a thing limited by the imagination of a marketing department.
I wish it were that smart. Perhaps dangerous but potentially useful but all you can do is turn off the stove so even if all the security issues were addressed there is very little value add to connecting your stove to your wifi.
i'm shocked that 50% of people are willing to do it. I wouldn't do it simply for the hassle, setting aside any ideological opposition to mass surveillance by my dishwasher.
Having stuff in my friend's "smart home" stop working because there was a hurricane and it couldn't connect to servers far away was also vindicating, tho.
Maybe many of us are pleased that ordinary customers are (even unwittingly) falling in line with our own values on security or usability and our own distaste for tech hype. (No, putting something on "the cloud", making an app for it, or making it "smart" doesn't automatically improve a product.)
Samsung? My new home has all Samsung appliances and I was shocked to see that a new fridge water filter was $50. Not a chance I’m paying that. Found a 2 pack of a compatible brand for $20, seems to work fine!
If the price were reasonable I would have just bought the Samsung replacements and called it a day. But instead they got $0 of my money.
Manufacturers have started adding RFID tags to those with unique IDs, so not only can they verify they're "genuine" water filters, but also stop you reusing the same RFID tag sticker for multiple filters.
GE will send you a bypass insert if you ask for one. I think they are intended for people who have a whole-home filter. Once you have that, you can peel off the RFID tag and stick it in the filter compartment and go back to buying non-RFID filters.
On my fridge it lights up the "not-filtering" light, but that's okay by me. I replace the filter every 3 months.
I'm waiting for the day they shut off your fridge because you bought "unapproved" food.
"Incompatible yogurt was detected! To ensure your refrigerator maintains an optimum temperature be sure to buy only GE compatible Chobani™ yogurt and foods from our other "GE Chill Eats®" partners."
I expect insurance companies would love to buy that kind of data. They could raise the rates of customers based on the contents of their fridge. Drink too much? Buy food that's too unhealthy? Expect to see your bills go up.
I've read they already do things like charge people more based on aggregated data like their zip code or an areas rate of fast food consumption (Perversely, health and life insurance companies also invest billions of dollars in stocks for fast food companies), but also based on individual data like social media posts, how much money a person makes, or how much TV a person watches. Whatever it takes to justify taking more out of your pocket.
For its part, LG saw an incremental increase in water-filter sales when it tracked water volumes on connected fridges versus non-connected fridges, the company told the Journal.
Consumers just don't understand how these things help the manufacturer earn a little extra money by invading their privacy. If they only understood how important this is to them, they would be much more cooperative.
Just monitoring the line voltage and the frequency with which it runs loads and at what temp will tell you the composition of the occupants of the place where it is located. And probably also whether the people there wfh or go to the office.
But can you differentiate the dishwasher and washing machine this way? Can you measure the actual wash cycles and settings they used? And more importantly, can the appliance manufacturer sell and profit off of that data? The answers are "maybe", "probably not", and "definitely not", the latter being the most important here.
Absolutely. I don't know where you get your answers but I've seen systems like this in practice and they are uncannily accurate. See also: smart electricity meters.
You can tell a lot about someone from how often the washing machine runs, and which modes get used - whether they live alone, have a large family - even whether they have pets - all data that, when tied to a user account which contains your name, address, email address, (inside leg measurement, blood group...) is valuable to advertisers.
The manufacturer doesn't care about the data, they care about selling it to advertisers. There's no better way to measure someone's actual washing machine usage than actually measuring their washing machine usage. The next-best thing is to buy data on how often the person buys laundry detergent.
A washing machine can probably tell if you have a family, what hours you're home and doing housework, what types of clothes you have, etc. They'll have their machine phone home constantly so they'll have your IP address logged and the SSID of your wireless network and your neighbors which will give them your location. They'll probably have your washer controlled via an app too that will constantly collect data from your cell phone even when you aren't using it.
They might actually eavesdrop on your network traffic. LG made a smart TV that crawled your home network collecting data and sending back things like any filenames it found on network shares or on USB drives that were connected (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/lg-sm...)
I wouldn't be surprised if it also let them do things like remotely brick your appliance. Maybe because you used an "unauthorized" brand of soap/fabric softener, or maybe just because your warranty period had ended and they think you should buy another washer. Maybe four years after purchase they decide to switch to a Washing As A Service model and force you to add a credit card which charges you a small fee for every load.
Windows 11 "optional" telemetry collects the IP address, hardware address of any networked devices plus any networked drives that it finds. It also scans for bluetooth devices and sends that data back.
The same reason everyone wants the most mundane details of our lives and a multi-billion dollar a year industry has sprung up around the buying and selling of that data. Because they know they can use it to their own advantage, always at our expense.
Microsoft has decided to use their OS as a data collection and ad pushing platform. The amount of dirt they must have on the average windows user is disturbing enough, but with office they get unprecedented insight into the internals of damn near every company including their own competitors. When my own company gave me a windows 10 machine, it came with Microsoft's keylogger enabled. First thing I did was tell them they should probably update the image they're using on new workstations to disable telemetry or at least make sure that every password and keypress wasn't being collected, but we still leak a ton of data to MS. Company data, employee data, and customer data. It's amazing how every company accepts it.
Is it though? I mean, you really don't have a choice. Entire industries are built up around Windows. Linux is definitely not capable of stepping in, and Apple seems content to keep macOS / iPadOS focused on high-end consumers only.
For example, to contribute my own "anecdata", I tried switching to Linux recently (I will attempt to do so again, soon). In the 3 months, I had more issues than I've had in 3 years of using Windows.
One such example is that KDE's multi-monitor support isn't that great (for example, KDE does not remember the size and position of any of its window anytime you resize or place them on any displays other than the left-most one - and this is maybe the best DE/WM Linux has to offer at this time for the general public), GNOME just seems to insist on their way or the highway. i3/Sway is a nice tiling wm which I daily-drove for a while. But it doesn't handle GUIs very well (unless that GUI is a web app) and forget switching between audio outputs and so on. It's a hassle until you key-bind and script everything. I imagine the Linux entire community suffers from the IKEA effect[0].
I'm perfectly capable of running Linux as my daily driver, and I really don't mind it at all. When Sway locks up at least daily because of swaylock (known bug for ~1y), and you're told not to use it, and Linux doesn't always want to wake up from sleep/suspend. Then you have to fiddle with the monitor every time it wakes or hard-code your display arrangement in a script.. and GNOME requires a ton of extensions just to accommodate my 'power-user' tendencies.
The community isn't quite so nice - any issues I had was met with some variation of "lol you're doing it wrong", "buy better hardware lol" or a "donate ploxz!/?? we'll see if it gets pushed up". I'm semi-retired, so I don't have money to donate. I want to contribute in develoment, but have a hard time figuring out the right way forward. I don't have any faith that whatever I do develop will reach an audience (even as an open source project). They seem allergic to any type of GUI - and it shows. I made about ~10 bug reports and all except one went ignored. The one that didn't get ignored was close it because "WONTFIX". Fair enough.
I understand that the community is built up around volunteers and I'm ok with that, too. I don't begrudge anyone, but when the community is sometimes toxic, issues don't get fixed, and I have to sysadmin my computer.. it's a struggle. I accept that, and that there will always be some issues. But, I need a break so I'm back on Windows.
As a Linux sysadmin for over 15 years (ran macOS as my desktop) it's a rock-solid and amazing server OS but when it comes to desktop.. it has me wanting for more. Administrating over 100 individual servers using I don't want to sysadmin my desktop and I don't want to be trapped in Apple's walled garden. What do I do?
Well, there wouldn't be a market for things like the Apple TV or Roku or Firestick or Chromecast if people actually used the smart features on their smart tvs.
On the contrary, I used the smart features on my TV and was so horrified by the experience of Samsung cramming ads and unwanted IPTV features into every part of the experience that I bought an Apple TV and disconnected the TV from the network!
Most users are probably totally unaware of their smart appliances' capabilities or can't figure out the confusing UI. I know that I can't half the time.
This. My parents have several smart appliances but were completely unaware. Even if they were aware they wouldn't care. Regardless of one's opinion of the privacy aspect, none of the "smart" functionality their appliances have is worth the time it takes to set it up. It's mostly pointless.
I am very technical minded and still struggle to set up most simple smart appliances (switches, plugs, light bulbs). Put it into pairing mode, download an app, create an account, switch wifi networks on your phone, enter your password, switch back, add an Alexa skill... The average user has no chance. I'm surprised the number is as high as 50%.
TBH I've found as being a technically minded person I often struggle more to setup supposedly simple things than some of my less technically inclined associates, mostly because I want to understand what it is doing and why, and I want to know what the various switches and fields mean. Whereas most of my other associates are happy to just click "next", "next", "next" and Done.
I was just bemoaning this yesterday: There are so many fancy electronic devices that I would love to use, if only the software wasn't hot garbage and actively working against my interests. Smart TV? That'd rock! But no, I'm not going to wait 15 seconds for it to boot, and I'm not going to pay for a device that shows me ads. Wifi-enabled washer/dryer/dishwasher? I'm working out how to retrofit that onto my existing devices! But, y'know, without the cloud and spying. Various "smart home" things? I'm actually happy with zwave et al., because, get this, they let me use my own FOSS against the devices. I mean, I'd prefer a user-flashable ESP8266/ESP32/etc. but I'll take what I can get.
Smart TV is easy fix, just set up pi hole/separate dnsmasq with whitelist (docker with bridged network on router?) or do something like this on a rp2040 or esp32 https://github.com/AdrianCX/pico_hole
> Wifi-enabled washer/dryer/dishwasher? I'm working out how to retrofit that onto my existing devices!
Shelly smart plug - set up an app somewhere to poll it and when power usage goes up - washing machine is on, power usage reaches idle for a while - its finished.
For other sensors, you mentioned zwave, curious what you're using.
Since I'm already in the Google ecosystem, I purchased a chromecast instead. CC's sport apps for most major streaming services, a decent ten foot interface and if you don't mind telling Google what you're up to, a voice search option. Although I wish it spoke wifi 6e just to get the device out of congested frequencies, many chromecasts also support ethernet. And you can of course dedicate a network segment or vlan to IOT devices and lock down their access however you like.
> For other sensors, you mentioned zwave, curious what you're using.
I'm not using it for sensors, and probably won't; I like zwave because it lets me use commercially produced UL certified devices with wall current - I don't trust myself to DIY a smart plug and not burn down the building. Sensors are safer in my mind, so for those DIY ESP8266 projects win.
countdown until my washer refuses to start the cycle until the facial recognition registers that my face has been present to watch a two minute ad for Tide
of course for a $14.99 monthly subscription to HomeAppliancesPlus I will be able to skip the ads...
Samsung TV starts playing ads if it feels you are idle so i don't connect it to internet directly so use a fire stick. I once connected tv to internet to update some firmware but disconnected the same day because of ads.
There are also concerns about control, in Texas there were people who signed something that allowed the companies to remotely control their ac, apparently at night time it was turned up to 82, I am worried about what other companies could do like smart washer ( how about allowed to wash cloths only after 10 pm ) or not allowed to use some setting like extra wash etc.
What would happen if your account gets locked and you cannot access your smart stove to cook a meal. All those people who posted that their oculus was locked out because their FB account go locked out. In my opinion most of these smart appliances are more of a hassle than worth it.
I agree with a lot of your post, but the Texas example is actually the kind of example I would prefer. Folks were not deceived when they signed up for the process. It was clearly spelled out, enjoy lower rates, but when energy grid gets hot, you might have some conditions throttled resulting in mild discomfort (the exact window of how much this could affect and the minimums was transparently communicated). And it was all opt-IN which I think is again a good thing.
I don't like when smart appliances like the Samsung connect to the internet for what I as a consumer hope are good things (like using Netflix with the push of a button, etc.) and instead abuse that by showing me ads -- not something they include very visibly in the agreement or feature sell. It is not transparent and near impossible to opt out of.
What I don't get about signing up to allow your thermostat to be remotely controlled for a discount, is that isn't really easy to circumvent the system? Either the cloud thermostat isn't even connected, or a second thermostat in parallel, or only sign up a thermostat that controls half your load (making the other half work harder), or even just a candle under the thermostat to make it think it's warmer than it is.
Making it do what it's advertised to do would either require fully trusting the hardware (and hardware in this case means the whole hvac system), or monitoring a home's electricity usage and having some after the facto punishment (which will only catch the unsophisticated ways of working around it).
The electrical utility program they’re talking about doesn’t control your thermostat, it’s a line-voltage device that is wired in-line with your air conditioning compressor. It has a relay that enables and disables the compressor circuit. The enable/disable signal comes from the utility. The furnace fan will still run.
Xcel Energy calls their program “Saver’s Switch” if you want to read more about it
That seems even easier to bypass, but makes more sense if they're just using that to moderate instantaneous draw (everyone's compressor kicking on at once), rather than trying to reduce total cooling demand.
But my original critique still applies. If you have two AC units, and only install the switch in series with one, do they figure it out based on your draw and cut your discount in half, or what? Or do they do the install themselves and check over your system. And if you later open up your own equipment and bypass it, they treat you similarly as if you were to just jump your electric meter?
I do wonder if this approach makes sense from the homeowner perspective too. Modulating your compressor means that you need a bigger compressor to handle the same cooling load, and short cycling isn't going to be good for it.
Yes, you could buy a second AC and do complex wiring and control trickery to hack the system... Or you could just not sign up for the voluntary system and pay an extra couple bucks a year.
Any effort to hack the system is going to be far more cost or hassle than just not signing up for the program, for people who are following financial incentives. If you want to hack the system for the fun of it, sure you could, but the utilities aren't really worried about that.
I'm overstating it because I'm analyzing it adversarially. But I could very easily see these situations happening emergently. Central HVAC in the main house, then an addition/office/etc that gets a mini split or even its own ducted HVAC. So sure, main AC gets set back 5 degrees but then you're still hot, so just kick the office AC on high and leave the door open.
Also jumpering over a low voltage thermostat takes like 5 minutes tops, and could be easily done by the type of tech enthusiast early adopter that would be interested in programs like these. And it only takes someone getting too hot once to try it, and then just continue doing it routinely. Never mind people for which the few bucks a year is significant.
> in Texas there were people who signed something that allowed the companies to remotely control their ac, apparently at night time it was turned up to 82
As I understand it, those people got a discount on their bill specifically _because_ they allowed for that.
We bought our samsung in 2016 and in... 2018 it started showing us ads, and then later they installed the "tv plus", uh, "feature". Which you can't uninstall so every time your toddler bumps the channel button on the remote, it will kick you out of whatever netflix/youtube/disney+ thing you're watching to go to some ad-supported BS. Over the years the UI has gone from good to almost unusably slow and laggy. Next time we move, we're trashing the 2016 samsung and getting something else, and never ever hooking it up to wifi.
When I bought a samsung tv for my home office, I explicitly never enabled the wifi, and plugged in an external FAANG device with a remote and control the TV via that. If the device gets buggy I can go buy a new one for $60.
> There are also concerns about control, in Texas there were people who signed something that allowed the companies to remotely control their ac, apparently at night time it was turned up to 82, I am worried about what other companies could do like smart washer ( how about allowed to wash cloths only after 10 pm ) or not allowed to use some setting like extra wash etc.
The electric utility is very clear about what would happen if you sign up for their energy saving program. It is possible to buy a home that has an energy saving switch already installed on the A/C circuit, but you can simply request to have it removed by the utility.
My mother called me freezing cold. Her nest thermostat had a "wifi connectivity lost" message on the screen and she couldn't (or didn't know how) to turn up the heat.
Thinking in terms of the average consumer, I think cybersecurity isn't a major concern, but the hassle of setup is. Most people expect an appliance to do its job with minimal fuss. (This can lead to problems, like how car owners can ignore oil change reminders and disable lane keep assist.) But in general simplicity is a good thing - it reduces the mental overhead needed for home life.
For appliance makers, they need to have a better selling point for connectivity. Only a few appliances benefit from automation and remote commands (like thermostats and some light fixtures). Other appliances, like ovens and clothes washers, require physical presence at the start of the cycle, have a predictable runtime, have simple interfaces, and can't predict failures (due to a lack of sensors and cost of further firmware development). So connectivity isn't beneficial.
If you already have a GE Washing Machine, with an account when you go to replace your Fringe you will be more prone to buy a GE Fridge so you do not have to setup a Samsung or LG or Whirlpool account...
I bought a smart tumble drier but never connected it. For me it was a combination of factors.
The smarts doesn't really do a lot for me. My house isn't that big, I can hear when it's done because it stops rumbling in the distance. Getting a notification on my phone isn't very useful.
It was offputting that it needs an app, and the app was rated 1 star on the play store. Do I want that on my phone? I didn't look into why it was rated like that.
Then I started wondering about exactly what Chinese data centre either the drier or the app connects to and decided I didn't need a smart tumbler drier. Not enough in it for me to risk whatever problems it may bring.
Appliances that ever need to grant privileged access to an external party (ex. manufacturer webserver or support) should have a physical switch for disabling that capability.
My new GE stove actually required me to connect it to wifi before I could use all the various modes it has. I bought it partly because it has an "air fryer" mode but couldn't use it until it was connected. I did it long enough to turn on the features and then blocked its access to the internet in my router. Now even though it's connected to my local wifi, I can't use the things like having an alarm on my phone since it can't connect to the internet. Utter bullshit on every level.
My favorite "feature" is that the phone app can turn on the light inside the oven. Which you can only see if you're standing right there, obviously.
> Now even though it's connected to my local wifi, I can't use the things like having an alarm on my phone since it can't connect to the internet.
NAT is partially to thank for that. ... there is pretty much no normie user supportable way of having a device talk to your phone short of having them both phone home to some cloud server.
They could support both direct connections for easy cases and expert users AND the cloud nonsense-- but then they'd have to implement their connectivity twice and they'll still end up with more support calls from users in the wrong mode.
> NAT is partially to thank for that. ... there is pretty much no normie user supportable way of having a device talk to your phone short of having them both phone home to some cloud server.
I bought a treadmill that is the same. I called and they don't allow anything but "manual mode" unless you hook it to the internet. (let alone the ifit subscription they try to push on you)
In addition to security and privacy I have two more concerns:
- Replacement of nice physical controls with touch screens and touch panels. It's so nice to have tactile feedback when you turn a knob compared to pressing some virtual button.
- Introduction of new failure modes which might make devices almost unusable without finding their instruction and following obscure reset procedures, i.e. you turn on some settings, and it's not so easy to turn it off.
> Replacement of nice physical controls with touch screens and touch panels. It's so nice to have tactile feedback when you turn a knob compared to pressing some virtual button.
Not to mention these appliances are often handled with unclean (slimy, dirty, wet etc.) fingers!
>Replacement of nice physical controls with touch screens and touch panels. It's so nice to have tactile feedback when you turn a knob compared to pressing some virtual button.
Honestly I'm surprised that 50% don't connect. As others have suggested, there's probably too much friction to setup. These aren't VCRs, they shouldn't need a tech to install them.
I mean, sure, I'll sign up for the whole shebang: smart device, subscription for consumables, automatic service. Whatever. But it has to work, dude.
If you're in the business of selling a dishwasher, you are going to suck at the business of selling dishwasher tablets / month. It's going to be more costly, you're going to miss dates, you're going to cock it up when I change my credit card.
There is a serious trust issue with these people. I don't think they can do this other thing. I really don't. They lack the organizational expertise. Plus the software they have is shit, so I don't trust them there either. They probably make a damned nice dishwasher motor and nice rotor arms and they can put it all together, but I don't trust them with the other stuff.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadConnecting a washing machine to the WiFi/Internet made me feel slimy.
2. We want our appliances to work for us rather than for data brokers
Now if my washing machine had a web server built in and I could log into it to see the status of the machine (spin cycle, rinse, finished 22 minutes ago) I would like that. In fact, if the smarts on the washing machine didn't phone home without asking me first I might even join it to my home network. But as long as the terms are that I must accept an electronic leash up my ass from the manufacturer with little say in what info they collect or to whom they give it if I want to see the status of my machine remotely then they can get stuffed.
Give me Bosch, Speedqueen, etc appliance quality with right to repair and I will pay. I want dumb yet sturdy equipment that will last.
You have a lot more faith in YC than I do.
They're ridiculously easy to work on and you can buy parts for them off PartSelect.com. The most common issues are that a relay on the control board goes out or the suspension wears out. Both are easy to diagnose.
I feel like retrofitting older appliances might be the way forward, whether preemptively or as part of a repair. Although I do admit there are benefits to modern brushless drives (etc), that would be hard to design a generic control board for.
Although recently having gotten a tiny bit of experience with off the shelf PLCs, going that way might be the right answer rather than reinventing the wheel.
Looked very simple. Had a relay for the oven and 2 temp sensors. One for controlling the oven, and another to shut everything down if the temp outside the oven got too hot.
I do wonder how many types of these boards would be required to fit the common appliance types.
Probably the biggest new difference I've seen is brushless motors with variable frequency drives, which requires its own power control electronics and probably some calibrations.
So in my estimation not very many. Packaging it all up in a way that an appliance tech could be comfortable installing would be the hard part.
Documentation would be fantastic, but it feels like a curation/discovery problem. After a bunch of deep searching, you can usually find a forum where people are discussing various lines of machines at a higher level, what features they have, repairability, etc. Parts websites generally have diagrams and whatnot (no idea where these come from or what it takes to get access to it wholesale). You can usually figure out cross reference part numbers from pouring through eBay/Amazon listings. And sometimes you even stumble onto a wiki or something where someone has documented a specific machine tangential to another project (eg Home Assistant).
Gathering it all up in one place to be useful, especially in a way so people will contribute their findings back so it can be self-sustaining, seems like the hard problem to me.
I was along term user (30 years) but my latest purchase was disappointing.
I'm sitting on $8k worth of rather new appliances that I am unable to repair in any fashion. When we bought them from a local appliance store — we live in a rural New England state — they were Miele-certified. Then they outsourced that certification to a local appliance-repair technician. Then Miele revoked the certification, or otherwise is no longer providing it, to that appliance-repair technician.
My appliances are broken. I call the place I bought it: they punt me to their repair technician. That repair technician is outright hostile and hates Miele and says they never call him back and he's not certified anymore. I call Miele. They punt me to "regional dispatch," which then ends up punting me behind the scenes back to the place I bought the appliances from, which doesn't ever call me back. I keep trying to push further, but all I get from Miele is that there are no certified technicians within X miles of me. This cycle has repeated 8 or 10 times.
The part I believe we need to fix the dishwasher is >$500 non-wholesale, so that is too expensive of a risk to take if it's not what will fix it. No non-certified appliance repair techs in the area (thin on the ground in general) will touch Miele products.
So I am literally waiting for them to stop working and then I guess I'll throw them away?
One of these days I'll generate the gumption to, I dunno, send a letter to Miele HQ or something?
So desperately screwed as a consumer here.
As long as this monitoring system can completely fail, and the machine still works, I'm okay with it. Ultimately, the more shit like this that gets shoved into appliances, the more the cost climbs. And, If I had to guess, actual functionality (eg. washing my clothes) is the target of cost cutting measures. Which is precisely what I don't want in an appliance.
https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Washers-and-Dryers/Samsu...
I do something like if power usage goes above x, then wait till it goes below that for at least 3 minutes and notify me then (exact timing may depend on the washer/dryer)
With these projects, you can replace the nasty privacy-invasive bits in the vendor's SW stack.
There's a buying guide to find a matching rootable robot for your needs: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/buying-supported-robots...
I got a pair of Dreame W10s in the last Black Friday deals and they're a great help.
I wish my money wouldn't go towards the vendor crapware that takes extra efforts to get rid of. But i couldn't be happier with the result, having automated the vacuuming and mopping.
Note to makers of "smart" appliances: if you want my business then support standard Zigbee or ZWave hubs.
Matter might improve things a bit.
They know they're not. Developers aren't stupid.
They’re all just tech demos… and often buggy ones
A valuable feature solves a problem
How big is your house? And why do you need to know when the cycle is finished?
I absolutely do not want a so-called "smart" appliance and will go out of my way not to buy one. I want something with as few buttons as possible, that promises to last a long time.
I have ADHD, my washer sending a push notification to my iOS devices (I have LG ThinQ enabled washer/dryer) means I have an alert in a place where I am already looking for alerts that my washing machine is done and I should go move the clothes into the dryer.
Before I enabled push notifications for this, my laundry could sometimes sit in the washer for days, getting all nasty and moldy and needing another cycle to be run just to get them clean before throwing them into the dryer.
That is why I need to know that the cycle is finished.
Why can't they just run a local webserver or API? I'd use that. Even more if it was a documented API and I could write my own automation for it.
Few years in, I realized what a lie, a mirage it all has been! I bought them to make my life easier, it did the reverse (with some very rare exceptions). I just kept seeing weird bugs, random forced updates, missed schedules, firmware issues, interoperability issues.
Then, I started seeing ads in physical mail, emails, even phone calls for new or renewing subscriptions. Real creepy stuff. All this to monitor usage and sell me more stuff ! I pulled the plug, dialed back on everything smart. I then realized I had a hard time getting my hands on products that get the job done and don't force me to connect it to the internet.
I'm now monitoring my router logs for weird activity, locking products down and actively figuring out ways to firewall them.
Such a waste!
Imagine that happening to your washing machine, or stove, or fridge. By malice or incompetence, the invisible hand of the cloud reaching down and making a device work differently than you're used to. No thanks.
But an easy fix for those recalcitrant 50% like me. Just make the device refuse to function at all unless it has (recent) internet connectivity. Problem solved.
It's simply the lesser of all evils to ensure people are relatively up to date on security.
I don't really like it either, but I understand it completely.
Apple, MS, etc should do the second. Even with a "do it now, or within 7 days, or we do it for you." Same for the router.
For goods that have safety implications (cars), the updates should NEVER be silent. And probably need a long notification period with a detailed "What's New".
1. It angers power users who want their computer to retain their workspace's context, which is often easily lost between reboots. 2. It reduces Windows' usefulness as an OS on which to set up and run long-term processes, especially ones with real-time sensitivity, since Windows may decide to reboot itself at some unpredictable point in the process.
I suspect they want to push you towards the server edition, because that's where they make their money.
There's no technical reason this is required - any system components will get updated after reboot, and this is not use Windows used to work.
I am convinced it is intentionally introduced behavior, but proving it is difficult.
That is why ISPs have lists of cable modems that are certified for their networks, and thus the ones allowed to connect to them as that is the list they have firmware updates for.
three times now i have been up late working on a project and it has kicked me offline to update. it’s so goddamned annoying. i wouldn’t have bought this router if i’d known it did this. (i also had to call them on the phone to get a custom ip range enabled on it, which, for a “pro” product, is just ridiculous).
Many, many, devices don't allow firmware downgrades, on purpose.
On the extreme end, Microsoft spent a huge amount of development effort to forbid that on the hardware level. I con't find the Xbox 360 link right now, but here's a Nintendo Switch one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23534793
https://hackaday.com/2022/03/18/welcome-to-the-future-where-...
My cable modem, which I own, is installed in a difficult to access location due to my lack of desire to run coax between buildings. In the summer every couple months it has to be rebooted when it loses lock and can't regain it on its own. I used to have a cronjob that would automatically handle it, until comcast without my authorization reached inside my property and applied a change to completely remove the ability to remotely reboot it. The remote reboot stuff was XSS vulnerable, so customers whos client PCs could access the cable modem could have had websites randomly rebooting it on them. This wasn't a problem for me, and could have been fixed by eliminating the XSS vulnerability instead.
Screw giving remote access to third parties.
So I think I'm pretty much 2 for 2 in terms of devices allowed remote access ending up screwing me over because of it. I can only imagine how many additional problems I would have had if I wasn't diligent in preventing any kind of remote access and avoiding having internet connected devices in the first place.
I wouldn't use their product again for anything involving energy storage. Solar only it seems to be fine.
But I was bit in by this in another way. This happened with an AT&T dsl modem I had years ago. AT&T pushed an update and then my network stopped working. I had static ip addresses and all of a sudden I got no traffic. I went round and round and because the static ip devices were not their equipment, and I could connect out (on their dynamic ip) they washed their hands of it. What a mess.
(I had to delve into the internal router logs, and eventually figured out the pace 5268ac modem had a bug. even though the firewall was DISABLED, packets were blocked unless I enabled firewall "stealth mode")
(Fun - if legally dubious - halloween prank: put a load of spooky sound effects on your phone, then wander around town looking for unsecured bluetooth soundbars!)
For example if you don't connect yourr LG subwoofer to wifi, it shows up as an access point, and ios shows an airplay device.
If there are no commercial precedents, are there open-source firmware or hardware IoT devices setting a good example?
"Allow anyone to remotely activate your stove and burn down your house while you are sleeping."
I thought that number would be much lower
Having stuff in my friend's "smart home" stop working because there was a hurricane and it couldn't connect to servers far away was also vindicating, tho.
If the price were reasonable I would have just bought the Samsung replacements and called it a day. But instead they got $0 of my money.
GE started this trend, but aren't alone.
On my fridge it lights up the "not-filtering" light, but that's okay by me. I replace the filter every 3 months.
"Incompatible yogurt was detected! To ensure your refrigerator maintains an optimum temperature be sure to buy only GE compatible Chobani™ yogurt and foods from our other "GE Chill Eats®" partners."
I've read they already do things like charge people more based on aggregated data like their zip code or an areas rate of fast food consumption (Perversely, health and life insurance companies also invest billions of dollars in stocks for fast food companies), but also based on individual data like social media posts, how much money a person makes, or how much TV a person watches. Whatever it takes to justify taking more out of your pocket.
For its part, LG saw an incremental increase in water-filter sales when it tracked water volumes on connected fridges versus non-connected fridges, the company told the Journal.
/sarcasm
Now I'm imagining a fancy washing machine that can measure the inseam of your pants and run tests on blood stains to determine blood type.
They might actually eavesdrop on your network traffic. LG made a smart TV that crawled your home network collecting data and sending back things like any filenames it found on network shares or on USB drives that were connected (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/lg-sm...)
I wouldn't be surprised if it also let them do things like remotely brick your appliance. Maybe because you used an "unauthorized" brand of soap/fabric softener, or maybe just because your warranty period had ended and they think you should buy another washer. Maybe four years after purchase they decide to switch to a Washing As A Service model and force you to add a credit card which charges you a small fee for every load.
Why do they need this data? I don't know.
Microsoft has decided to use their OS as a data collection and ad pushing platform. The amount of dirt they must have on the average windows user is disturbing enough, but with office they get unprecedented insight into the internals of damn near every company including their own competitors. When my own company gave me a windows 10 machine, it came with Microsoft's keylogger enabled. First thing I did was tell them they should probably update the image they're using on new workstations to disable telemetry or at least make sure that every password and keypress wasn't being collected, but we still leak a ton of data to MS. Company data, employee data, and customer data. It's amazing how every company accepts it.
Is it though? I mean, you really don't have a choice. Entire industries are built up around Windows. Linux is definitely not capable of stepping in, and Apple seems content to keep macOS / iPadOS focused on high-end consumers only.
For example, to contribute my own "anecdata", I tried switching to Linux recently (I will attempt to do so again, soon). In the 3 months, I had more issues than I've had in 3 years of using Windows.
One such example is that KDE's multi-monitor support isn't that great (for example, KDE does not remember the size and position of any of its window anytime you resize or place them on any displays other than the left-most one - and this is maybe the best DE/WM Linux has to offer at this time for the general public), GNOME just seems to insist on their way or the highway. i3/Sway is a nice tiling wm which I daily-drove for a while. But it doesn't handle GUIs very well (unless that GUI is a web app) and forget switching between audio outputs and so on. It's a hassle until you key-bind and script everything. I imagine the Linux entire community suffers from the IKEA effect[0].
I'm perfectly capable of running Linux as my daily driver, and I really don't mind it at all. When Sway locks up at least daily because of swaylock (known bug for ~1y), and you're told not to use it, and Linux doesn't always want to wake up from sleep/suspend. Then you have to fiddle with the monitor every time it wakes or hard-code your display arrangement in a script.. and GNOME requires a ton of extensions just to accommodate my 'power-user' tendencies.
The community isn't quite so nice - any issues I had was met with some variation of "lol you're doing it wrong", "buy better hardware lol" or a "donate ploxz!/?? we'll see if it gets pushed up". I'm semi-retired, so I don't have money to donate. I want to contribute in develoment, but have a hard time figuring out the right way forward. I don't have any faith that whatever I do develop will reach an audience (even as an open source project). They seem allergic to any type of GUI - and it shows. I made about ~10 bug reports and all except one went ignored. The one that didn't get ignored was close it because "WONTFIX". Fair enough.
I understand that the community is built up around volunteers and I'm ok with that, too. I don't begrudge anyone, but when the community is sometimes toxic, issues don't get fixed, and I have to sysadmin my computer.. it's a struggle. I accept that, and that there will always be some issues. But, I need a break so I'm back on Windows.
As a Linux sysadmin for over 15 years (ran macOS as my desktop) it's a rock-solid and amazing server OS but when it comes to desktop.. it has me wanting for more. Administrating over 100 individual servers using I don't want to sysadmin my desktop and I don't want to be trapped in Apple's walled garden. What do I do?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
This turned into a rant.. so I apologize for that.
> Wifi-enabled washer/dryer/dishwasher? I'm working out how to retrofit that onto my existing devices!
Shelly smart plug - set up an app somewhere to poll it and when power usage goes up - washing machine is on, power usage reaches idle for a while - its finished.
For other sensors, you mentioned zwave, curious what you're using.
I'm not using it for sensors, and probably won't; I like zwave because it lets me use commercially produced UL certified devices with wall current - I don't trust myself to DIY a smart plug and not burn down the building. Sensors are safer in my mind, so for those DIY ESP8266 projects win.
I share this sentiment, last I looked it would also be more expensive and off-the-shelf plugs with HTTP interface work just fine.
of course for a $14.99 monthly subscription to HomeAppliancesPlus I will be able to skip the ads...
There are also concerns about control, in Texas there were people who signed something that allowed the companies to remotely control their ac, apparently at night time it was turned up to 82, I am worried about what other companies could do like smart washer ( how about allowed to wash cloths only after 10 pm ) or not allowed to use some setting like extra wash etc.
What would happen if your account gets locked and you cannot access your smart stove to cook a meal. All those people who posted that their oculus was locked out because their FB account go locked out. In my opinion most of these smart appliances are more of a hassle than worth it.
I don't like when smart appliances like the Samsung connect to the internet for what I as a consumer hope are good things (like using Netflix with the push of a button, etc.) and instead abuse that by showing me ads -- not something they include very visibly in the agreement or feature sell. It is not transparent and near impossible to opt out of.
Making it do what it's advertised to do would either require fully trusting the hardware (and hardware in this case means the whole hvac system), or monitoring a home's electricity usage and having some after the facto punishment (which will only catch the unsophisticated ways of working around it).
Xcel Energy calls their program “Saver’s Switch” if you want to read more about it
But my original critique still applies. If you have two AC units, and only install the switch in series with one, do they figure it out based on your draw and cut your discount in half, or what? Or do they do the install themselves and check over your system. And if you later open up your own equipment and bypass it, they treat you similarly as if you were to just jump your electric meter?
I do wonder if this approach makes sense from the homeowner perspective too. Modulating your compressor means that you need a bigger compressor to handle the same cooling load, and short cycling isn't going to be good for it.
Yes, you could buy a second AC and do complex wiring and control trickery to hack the system... Or you could just not sign up for the voluntary system and pay an extra couple bucks a year.
Any effort to hack the system is going to be far more cost or hassle than just not signing up for the program, for people who are following financial incentives. If you want to hack the system for the fun of it, sure you could, but the utilities aren't really worried about that.
Also jumpering over a low voltage thermostat takes like 5 minutes tops, and could be easily done by the type of tech enthusiast early adopter that would be interested in programs like these. And it only takes someone getting too hot once to try it, and then just continue doing it routinely. Never mind people for which the few bucks a year is significant.
As I understand it, those people got a discount on their bill specifically _because_ they allowed for that.
When I bought a samsung tv for my home office, I explicitly never enabled the wifi, and plugged in an external FAANG device with a remote and control the TV via that. If the device gets buggy I can go buy a new one for $60.
This kind of craziness is illegal in Europe and I honestly cannot understand why this is not regulated in the US.
The electric utility is very clear about what would happen if you sign up for their energy saving program. It is possible to buy a home that has an energy saving switch already installed on the A/C circuit, but you can simply request to have it removed by the utility.
For appliance makers, they need to have a better selling point for connectivity. Only a few appliances benefit from automation and remote commands (like thermostats and some light fixtures). Other appliances, like ovens and clothes washers, require physical presence at the start of the cycle, have a predictable runtime, have simple interfaces, and can't predict failures (due to a lack of sensors and cost of further firmware development). So connectivity isn't beneficial.
If you already have a GE Washing Machine, with an account when you go to replace your Fringe you will be more prone to buy a GE Fridge so you do not have to setup a Samsung or LG or Whirlpool account...
The smarts doesn't really do a lot for me. My house isn't that big, I can hear when it's done because it stops rumbling in the distance. Getting a notification on my phone isn't very useful.
It was offputting that it needs an app, and the app was rated 1 star on the play store. Do I want that on my phone? I didn't look into why it was rated like that.
Then I started wondering about exactly what Chinese data centre either the drier or the app connects to and decided I didn't need a smart tumbler drier. Not enough in it for me to risk whatever problems it may bring.
My favorite "feature" is that the phone app can turn on the light inside the oven. Which you can only see if you're standing right there, obviously.
NAT is partially to thank for that. ... there is pretty much no normie user supportable way of having a device talk to your phone short of having them both phone home to some cloud server.
They could support both direct connections for easy cases and expert users AND the cloud nonsense-- but then they'd have to implement their connectivity twice and they'll still end up with more support calls from users in the wrong mode.
isn't this what MDNS is for?
- Replacement of nice physical controls with touch screens and touch panels. It's so nice to have tactile feedback when you turn a knob compared to pressing some virtual button.
- Introduction of new failure modes which might make devices almost unusable without finding their instruction and following obscure reset procedures, i.e. you turn on some settings, and it's not so easy to turn it off.
Not to mention these appliances are often handled with unclean (slimy, dirty, wet etc.) fingers!
And vital to anyone visually impaired.
If you're in the business of selling a dishwasher, you are going to suck at the business of selling dishwasher tablets / month. It's going to be more costly, you're going to miss dates, you're going to cock it up when I change my credit card.
There is a serious trust issue with these people. I don't think they can do this other thing. I really don't. They lack the organizational expertise. Plus the software they have is shit, so I don't trust them there either. They probably make a damned nice dishwasher motor and nice rotor arms and they can put it all together, but I don't trust them with the other stuff.