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

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.

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)