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

Nothing new

[Em Ellel]

"Easter eggs" like this outside PC's are a common thing. I mean these started on console games. But I do not thing this even qualifies as an "easter egg". Demo modes are common in many appliances. They are usually well documented thogh.

My Sony TV has a "service tunning mode" (it's amaizing how much you can mess with the unit) My TiVo has some hidden controlls, as well as a special combo that sends in close captioning names of the people who worked on it. My car stereo has a demo mode that comes the first time you power the unit up. Pretty much anything controlled by any sort of soft/firm-ware of any sort can have these "tunable" parameters and other hidden functions.

I used to own an old RCA TV. This particular model had no remote, but almost identical one with a few extra features did. Universal remotes did not work. So I opened it up. Sure enough it had IR recievers covered up in black tape. You never know.

-Em

X-Ray Machines

[blintz]

If any of you have repaired xray machines, you will know that there are a lot of relays involved. When you start the machine up you will hear the relays click when they engage. Apparently one xray company had the relays switch on and off at startup to play a song. I guess they used that as a diagnostic tool as well. It has been said that some of the older xray repair techs can go through a functions check and narrow down what's wrong just be listening for the sound of the relays clicking.