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

Re:Nothing new

[unitron]

You wouldn't happen to be able to post the model number of that RCA, would you? Did you remove the tape and get the set to respond to commands from the remote?

Easter egg site

[polymath69]

There are non-computer Easter eggs tabulated here, covering everything from Timex watches to chocolate dispensing machines, from oscilloscopes to Furbys. The site's a pain to navigate, but there's good stuff to be had.

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.

Re:My VCR crashes

[unitron]

Please email me so that I can provide you with the URL of a site frequented by TV techs so that you can post this problem and see what theories they might have as to the cause. I'd very much like to see what they have to say. I prefer not to post the URL here because the last thing the site needs is a bunch of adolescent trolls from Slashdot.

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.

Re:X-Ray Machines

[joshwa]

Speaking of relays playing a song, lots of Fleet ATMs in Boston and NY (I've not seem them elsewhere) are engineered so that when you get cash, the little money-moving belts play the Woody Woodpecker laugh before they spit out your money. It's always good for a laugh...

Re:X-Ray Machines

[michael_cain]

Long ago (just knowing this says something about my age) telephone crossbar switching systems were controlled by relay logic. I met several central office craft people who could identify that something was wrong with a ten-foot rack full of relays by listening to the rhythm of clicks as a call was processed...

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 !

Yeah...

[cr0sh]

2600 had an article a couple of years back about finding an easter egg in an exercise machine of some sort, and the author wondered the same thing.

Incidentally, I've been thinking about "hacking" out an easter egg on my Sanyo microwave - it has a very interesting display, with a ton of modes - I would be surprised if there _wasn't_ an easter egg hidden in it somewhere.

On my Cox Digital receiver (a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 2000 box), you can go into a special "diagnostic" mode on the box by pressing the diamond and target keys together after turning it on - basically, I believe you have to turn it on, then press and hold the target button (to the left of the arrow pad on the box), then hit the diamond button at the same time (in the middle of the arrow pad) - at least, I think that is the way - I don't have the box in front of me.

Gives a lot of info about the box...