Easter Eggs in Appliances?

nneul asks: "A few weeks ago I bought and installed a new Kenmore Elite dishwasher from Sears. A couple days ago, it stopped working, all the buttons on the panel would just blink when pushed, and pressing "start" would run this weird mini-wash cycle. Disconnecting the power to the unit had no effect. Turns out (after having Sears come out for a warrantee repair on it), through some sequence of keypresses on the panel, I had enabled "store demo mode", which required a completely undocumented set of keypresses to turn off. (Even the sears guy had to call to get the code). My question - has anyone else ever seen other appliance "easter eggs" like this? In this case, it was pretty annoying, but I wonder what other sort of interesting secret key sequences there are on ordinary home appliances/tvs/etc." Makes you wonder. If you start pushing random buttons on your microwave, don't be surprised if it suddenly starts up with a rousing rendition of Devo's "Whip It!"

Comments

My VCR crashes

[crow]

It's not a feature; it's a bug.

My Sony VCR from a few years ago will crash when playing back Farscape. It works fine with everything else I've tried to record, and it records Farscape fine, but when playing it back, at least once per episode (regardless of record speed), the VCR will crash. The power goes off and the clock is reset.

So in this case, there apparently is some special signal that the VCR is noting on the tape that is, for some reason, a part of Farscape.

Weird.

Industrial Laser Easter Egg

[Chris Y Taylor]

I had (ok, my boss had... but it might as well have been mine) a 1 kiloWatt industrial laser that had an interesting easter egg.

It had 32k of memory in its onboard computer for storing CNC programs. (did I mention it was an old industrial laser?) The same company sold a model that had 64k of memory, for more money. But the laser manufacturer apparently decided it would be cheaper to only have one assembly line building the lasers, so all of them were actually made with 64k and the 32k versions must have been "dumbed down" with a software patch.

I discoved a very complex set of secret codes that would "transform" my 32k industrial laser into the 64k version. Very handy. The codes were probably used to allow the 32k machines to be "upgraded" to 64k by a factory service rep; for a few thousand dollars. (and you thought memory for your PC was expensive)

Industrial-grade easter egg

[rainer_d]

I've heard a story where a large, CNC-type
machine with a LC-display had a special
"exhibition-mode".

Putting the machine in this mode would halt normal operations and you could play a "snake"-type
game on the display.

When the workers discovered this, the late-night-shifts tended to halt production for
some time just to play the game...;-)

And you thought, only crypto-backdoors were dangerous !