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Ask Slashdot: Any Dishwasher Hackers Out There?
New submitter writes: I just replaced my dishwasher with a basic, inexpensive Sears model. It works fine, but only has 3 different wash cycles. I'm betting that the code to manage more cycles (as in more-expensive models) is already in the microcontroller and just needs inputs to select it. Is there any information available on this? Beyond dishwashers, have you done any useful hacks to household appliances more generally? I'd probably support a Kickstarter project that adds nice wireless notifications to my oven, clothes washer, and dishwasher.
Different firmware is loaded into each controller. Not to mention the cheaper models probably won't have the hardware to run the omitted cycles properly.
If you need more than three different cycles, you're doing it wrong. Try not leaving cruddy dishes accumulate for so long (or do them by hand in the first place).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
you'd just be better off building your own dishwasher. Even if this works, it removes the reliability of the unit and breaks warranty, so it's definitely not worth the effort.
Frankly, the only useful dishwasher modes are water saving, normal, and heavy/pots and pans. Everything else (especially fine china settings) is just a gimmick.
That would get you a life sentence. Better to buy a machine.
You start monkeying around with the plumbing and there's a leak, and you are found responsible, your insurance company will gladly pay for all the damage and happily increase your premiums by 10x as soon as they can.
Adding a few spoonfuls of trisodium phosphate to your dishwasher is hack #1. Most consumer-grade detergents these days no longer contain phosphates, since they act as fertilizers and promote algae growth when everyone disposes of large quantities in wastewater. Unfortunately, the missing phosphates have not been replaced with anything as effective at cleaning your dishes. Trisodium phosphate (TSP) is sold in powdered form in the paint section of hardware stores, because it is used for surface preparation. It's cheap. Don't get the "TSP Substitute" - it's not effective, just like the weak new detergents these days. Toss a couple teaspoons of real TSP in with your detergent for truly clean dishes, if you're not too concerned about the plague of algae growth. It works extremely well.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Ethanol is an effective solvent for a wide range of materials.
I've tried consuming various quantities of ethanol before washing dishes. In my experience it doesn't help at all.
raspi or similar.
But what do you want to get better? How many fancy actuators does this thing have, that could make more programs useful? Heating water, pumping through the rotors, open flaps for solvent, pump to remove water. Anything else? What do you want to optimize for? Low energy consumption, good cleaning result, fast completion, ...?
The reason they suck is they now have very weak motors - to change that out is not an easy modification. One can change the computer to use enough water.
People are washing on the long cycles and multiple times - using a lot of water in the sink rinsing so they will get clean - the regs are not doing what they think.
I wish I could have the Maytag I bought in 1986 - it worked really well.
They have destroyed Dishwashers, Washing machines, water-heaters, shower heads (they did improve conditioners. )
I just want the government to stay the F*** out of my life.
The simplest cheapest dishwashers doesn't use 'code'. They use a simpler electromechanical system called 'clockwork', that turn various switches on and off as time goes by. These switches control the pumps and valves that makes the dishwasher work,
What are they? I've owned several dishwashers in my life I've only ever used one type of cycle on each of them, standard.
What are you doing that requires you to put more thought into washing dishes than loading them and hitting the start button? This sounds like a simple case of more != better, unless you're in marketing and like selling shit with more features.
You could post the model of dishwasher. Or better, use the online repair manuals to expose the controller and read & report what model SOC it uses and what support chips. c'mon!
I'd probably support a Kickstarter project that adds nice wireless notifications to my oven, clothes washer, and dishwasher.
I would avoid doing anything that might draw the attention of Sears (or other corporations) as they would doubtless try and sue you for attempting to circumvent a profit protect... umm, I mean of course a copyright protection device.
Wouldn't at all be surprised if the microcontroller used in such an appliance is one-time programmable only, or is mask-programmed (do they still do that?) during manufacture of the microcontroller itself, considering the huge quantities an appliance manufacturer would buy them in, so there wouldn't be any 'reprogramming' of it. Even if it's flash-based and you could reprogram it, I also wouldn't be surprised if it's got a read protect fuse blown on it, to protect their code from being copied, and you'd need the original code to decompile and use as a template for anything else you might want it to do. Even then, what's the chance that the microcontroller in question would even have sufficient free space for any significant amounts of code to be added to it? Honestly, after all the trouble you'd go to, and with the risk of completely screwing up your dishwasher, you might want to consider just getting a better one if you're not happy with what you have now, unless you really do have that much free time on your hands and nothing better to do.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
http://inhabitat.com/hand-powered-circo-independent-dishwasher-saves-time-space-money-and-water/
I had the same problem, so I switched to isopropyl alcohol.
WORKS GRATE
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Near field communication tags, instead of wireless, since all these things listed complete based on time, I just set the tag to start a timer on my device. When it's done, ding!
Boil a pot of water for cooking? 8 minutes. Preheat the oven? Ditto. Cycle of laundry (both drier and washer complete and ready for unloading), 50 minutes.
The other benefit of this method is being able to see how much is remaining for planning, rather than waiting for a wireless update to know what's going on, and lacking info in the meantime.
NFC tags are also useful for other stuff, "nap" tag stuck to the side of my bed turns off certain phone sounds, sets a 25 min. timer and disables auto-rotation of the screen.
NFC tag on dash the car, disables wireless, enables dashcam (and/or nav software), enables autorotation of the screen.
The NFC stickers cost pennies per, so you end up buying at least a dozen and putting them to various uses.
Stop fucking with electrical devices that control mains water inlet into your house.
Seriously.
And I echo all the "one setting" / "won't happen" posts here. You probably can't (often there's a microcontroller but pissing about with them nowadays is almost impossible. Even simple PIC chips can be made "write-once" very easily and often are. The whole ELM327 clone market came about because of one chip not protecting it's code and it no doubt destroyed profits overnight.
Even if you DO get a firmware from it, reverse-engineering it is a lot of pissing about. Even if you get a replacement firmware / modifiable firmware / emulated board back into the device, what do you think it's going to be able to do? Activate pump. Deactivate pump. Activate heater. Deactivate heater. Open valve. Close valve. That's about it. You might be able to play with timings and temperatures but more likely you'll have several months of flooding your kitchen, blowing the fuses and/or setting the place on fire by running over-spec.
And what could you gain? Very, very, very slightly cleaner dishes. Possibly.
There's a reason that the washing machine market is nearly 100 years old, and yet in all the time that it's been electrical (I remember large rotary electromechanical switches on a washing machine, etc.) or electronic, nobody really bothers to make "clone" spare parts for those things. They rarely go wrong (the pumps themselves? That's another matter). Rarely can be tinkered with in any significant way. Rarely would be worth the time, effort and liability to play with.
I ripped mine out because it wastes water, electricity, and is noisy. Do the dishes the old fashioned way.
I admit I have not tried this with a dishwasher. But on other devices, I found that the existing buttons were wired in a grid matrix something like a phone keypad or computer keyboard. What I mean is you have several horizontal and several vertical wires (schematic speaking, they might go anywhere in the actual pc board). Each button connects one horizontal and one vertical wire. You will likely find combinations that don't have buttons. Add a button and see what it does. I have done this on car radios and home CD players and the like.
Way back in 1975, I started as a technical trainee at the Nevada State Highway Department. They had just recently purchased a bunch of Compucorp (?) electronic calculators, some of which were programmable. The visible difference was a slide button on the top of the keyboard that could be set to "program", which meant memorize the series of keys being pressed, and "run" which would execute your "program". I found that if I carefully pulled back the metallic faceplate on the non-programmable models, the "program" key was still there and could be easily manipulated with a pencil. Using an X-acto knife, I modified all the non-programmable models by cutting out a hole in the faceplate that almost looked factory. Not sure what this has to do with washing dishes, but thought I'd share.
To define a cycle :
This would be a program with 3 different cycles:
(rough clean) Fill a quarter of tank, Spin left 50rpm, spin right 50rpm, empty tank
(clean) Fill a eighth of tank Spin left 50rpm, spin right 50rpm, Spin left 100rpm, spin right 100rpm, empty tank
(rince) Spin left 200rpm, spin right 200rpm, empty tank, Spin left 200rpm, spin right 200rpm, empty tank
Maybe he wants more programs?
One hack I'd really like to do is a warm rinse cycle on a washing machine. A 15C increase in water temperature can make a big difference in rinsing effectiveness. My first washing machine did have a warm rinse cycle, but the US Govt, in their infinite wisdom, decided to require washing machines to only use cold water for rinse.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
If you haven't already done so, install the latest version of Wife Software. Make sure it's backward-compatible.
hahaaaa! the only reason i would want washing machines to be WIFI-enabled would be to hack them in order to see this sort of thing happen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - the only problem being of course that if [by-default] insecure IoT enabled washing machines really DID end up like this, it would be totally and utterly unsafe. kids or animals in the same room as tens of thousands of washing machines all spinning at 5,000 RPM under remote-DDOS-mass-hacked-computer-control... generally bad and unfavourable en-masse outcome. still, sadly, i can genuinely foresee something like this actually happening. with resultant lawsuits, company directors being imprisoned for mass-murder, and, finally, then and ONLY then would laws be put in place which make it a criminal offense to not properly secure IoT devices. the sad thing is that we as tech-savvy people damn well know RIGHT NOW that such laws are critical and necessary, but that law-makers are flat-out ignorant of the dangers.
GE products allow for this some modifications: https://firstbuild.com/greenbean/
I bought a top of the line GE appliance, after trying out a Kitchenaid and Bosch. I thought I would have to hack the GE to make it do what I want (clean my dishes), because the other models didn't do it properly. Turns out the GE is far superior in build quality and wash quality. I didn't need to hack it at all, and it's works great. Maybe one day I'll play around with it, but at this point I don't need to.
it's motors and cams?
New dishwashers' regular cycles are now 3-4 hours. Yes, you heard right. That's because dishwasher cycles are now regulated from Washington, DC. You see, the theory is that if you use less water you will save the earth from complete catastrophe. Just as it is illegal to bypass pollution-control devices in your Washington, D.C.-mandated car, it is entirely likely that it is illegal to bypass world-saving firmware in your dishwasher, even without DRM or DMCA.
The best solution is to just buy a used dishwasher from before about the year 2006. Even better, buy one that is completely electromechanical, and just install your own controls, for example, toggle switches.
http://www.neonsquirt.com/dishwasher.html
http://www.neonsquirt.com/dish...
You're not wrong. On the other hand, it'd cost about $3 to replace the microcontroller with a new one. One flashed with the Arduino bootloader would be simple to use. (You don't need the whole Arduino board) .
It may come as a shock to you, but some people prepare food at home, that requires the use of an actual oven, or for that matter, even a stove. Make, say, potatoes au graten and you're TOTALLY SCREWED with the cheapest dishwasher and cheapest detergent, unless you want to run it through 5 times in a row.
The TSP not only helps initially remove the food from dishes, it also helps keep it from re-depositing back onto them from the water.
Whatever the newer Cascade gelpacks used to replace Phosphates while still being able to clean decently apparently also completely destroys anything made from aluminum. It turns totally black and makes anything it touches black too.
I bought two full cases of the old classic Cascade Processional Line with phosphates before it completely disappeared from the market (and got replaced by the phosphate free stuff). It cleans REALLY well compared to most everything else I've tried.
Once that's gone I guess I'll have to go with those Finish powerball tabs (the regular, not the orange or lemon). Those are about the best compromise I've found between getting stuff pretty clean without destroying pans, that you can still buy at any normal store.
Tim Allen did an episode of "Home Improvement" where he upgraded a dishwasher. Or you could just download the episode for pointers.
As for me, my new dishwasher is just electro-mechanical relays.
I have owned an appliance repair business for a while now. There are a number of common cases. Some controllers have a plug to dip switches that set the model that the board is installed in. In this case the board can be used across a range of products. All of the products will be of the same type, all dish washers, cloths washers, dryers, etc.. GE fridge & cloths washer controllers are a good example of this. Then there are controllers that share the same PCB but only have the parts populated for the model that it is intended for. You see this a lot in wall mounted ovens. The controller in a single oven unit has only half the parts compared to one for a double oven. Of course there is case where the controller is built with a single purpose in mind. I worked in IT for many years and retired at an early age. I would see no reason why an Arduino or PI could be easily used in place of. A modular unit could be built to plug in the proper relays and input devises. Most of the manufactures controllers are large so it wold be possible to substitute in the current space. If I were going to start an appliance manufacturing business, I would definitely look at doing something more uniform across models and products.
xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that. xxx: So we're sitting here, looking through his, uhm, "legacy" xxx: You're gonna love this xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message "late at work" to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login. xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time". xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am. xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fucking-coffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens a telnet session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has a TCP socket up and running) and sends something like sys brew. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk. xxx: holy sh*t I'm keeping those Original: http://bash.im/quote/436725 (in Russian)
Nothing will cut through the greasey grimey shleck baked onto my oven.
Not toxic oven cleaner, not Brillo pads, not the self-cleaning feature (which uses exceptionally high temps to turn shit straight to ash). Anything that removes it only does so by removing the underlying steel and enamel of the oven itself.
Please stop with y our microaggressions.
Womanual Cycle, please.
Do it now, you good-for-nothing shitboy. Rid the world of your pestilent presence.
Have you tried thermite?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Unless your time is worthless to you, you'll spend more time screwing with it and derive little, if any benefit.
Just go get a new one. We replaced a 17-year old Kenmore, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that new dishwashers are super quiet and have more cycles than we could possibly make use of (kind of silly, really).
They use less energy, but often they don't clean as well with lower-temp hot water. It's a trade off. We replaced our water heater recently and get much hotter water at a lower cost, so we can crank up the incoming water temp a bit and it cleans just fine.
It also makes a world of difference with the new ones how you position the plates and bowls. Older dishwashers had bigger motors and so it didn't matter so much how stuff was placed inside, everything got blasted clean no matter what.
But with the lame-ass Energy Star bullshit all the motors and pumps they use now are smaller, so they just don't do as good a job. Just take an extra minute to make sure that the plates and bowls and stuff aren't blocking each other. Once you do that it'll be fine.
The new ones are as quiet as can be, though- if not for the lights we could barely tell ours is on and washing. And as long as the water is hot enough it'll clean everything just fine.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Are there any decent hacks--or better yet, replacement firmwares / jailbreaking techniques out there for the Audi Navigation System (RNS-E)? This is Audi's system, used in 2005-2010 models, so I doubt there's any real encryption or security measures to prevent that...
Hopefully, there's some way to set it up for Bluetooth streaming...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
and for those of us who like things at least somewhat formatted:
xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.
xxx: So we're sitting here, looking through his, uhm, "legacy"
xxx: You're gonna love this
xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message "late at work" to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login.
xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time".
xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.
xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fucking-coffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens a telnet session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has a TCP socket up and running) and sends something like sys brew. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk.
xxx: holy sh*t I'm keeping those
Original: http://bash.im/quote/436725 (in Russian)
When I finally decided I had enough CDs to warrant my own player (borrowed my parent's one up to that point all the time), I afforded the cheapest one that could be found in the local store. I realized fairly quickly that it really did lack one thing: the screen for track number etc. was just LCD, no backlight. I pulled the reflective foil on the back, put some white plastic for scattering the light and two LEDs behind it and that was it.
While doing the above hack I realized that the inputs from the buttons for play, stop, skipping tracks etc. were connected in a matrix that had quite a few unused interconnects... It turned out that some of them did trigger undocumented functions like fast forward, repeat from A to B and the like. I wired buttons for those functions and - well - never used them.
As for dishwashers and the like: buy the best quality stuff for a resonable price in decent used condition and never worry again. Mine was 10 years old at the time and I it's still happily chugging away 15 years later !
Chisel and hammer can scrape it off
My Clothes Washer, Dryer and Dish washer all notify me and my wife when the cycle is completed.. all it took was some smart switches that monitor power consumption (Z-Wave).. Will work with fine with any 120v appliance.
When power goes over 20W it flags the device as on, if the appliance flagged as running and goes for longer than 5mins using less than 4w of power, its then decided the cycle has completed and a notification is triggered.. thats basically it.
I even scripted up a flood sensor in basement, so if my sewer pipe clogs the Dish and Clothes washers will shutdown so they dont contribute to any additional flooding.
Cleaning it would only destroy the taste of the food. It's well seasoned, like Al Bundy's BBQ.
(I have personal experience with one brand, from the vendor side, as of the turn of the millennium.)
It was cheaper to install all the processors and only enable the number that were paid for than to actually have boards with missing CPUs etc.
The extras doubled as replacements for potential failed devices (with flaked-out devices disabled and their replacement enabled and configured to appear to be the failed unit) unless/until more were paid for and activated. Then it ran with fewer spares (and thus a higher probability of eventually requiring a board swap or device replacement in the field - which, in mainframe applications, can be a major disaster.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Dishwashers (or other large utilities) are actually quite simple machines.
There is usually a pump, one or more heating elements (most likely on a (solid-state) relay or thyristor), a motor (again on a relay or thyristor), a few buttons, small relays/low power circuits and switches (such as 'door closed', 'child lock', 'start/stop', 'cycle select', 'water basin full', 'water basin empty') and perhaps a few sensors (temperature and humidity would be my guess but I'm deducing from my own dishwasher that those are just on a timer).
All of those are relatively simple to run on any type of electronic board. Most likely the circuit board(s) just runs a few wires to each of the components and you can figure each of them out based on a repair manual and/or testing them out with some simple gear (a cheap scope, an analyzer (in case you get a fancy digital (I2C) sensor or LCD display) and a few multimeters should get you there). You could replace the entire circuit board with an Arduino-like device. You then simply have to figure out what you want each sensor and switch to do (and figure out all the possible failure scenarios). I doubt many machines still use hardwired failsafes (eg. cut the water flow if the basin is full without going through the chip) so you may flood your kitchen a few times before you figure out all the details - using timers to measure things would be a 'really bad idea' but it seems to me some designs do use that method (my dishwasher runs the pump on empty for what seems to be a very long time)
Modifying the chip will be harder, they're typically proprietary and custom chips, you could get very lucky to find a JTAG interface but most likely it's all soldered and glued/epoxied in (especially with 'wet' appliances). You'd be better off starting with another appliance. I found an old cheap clothes dryer to be the most simple of all (a 'program' switch which was really a divider for the timer speed and a multi-switch - each setting would just turn on/off one of the 2 heating elements and add a different resistor to the temp sensor), a timer (one that goes tick tick tick until it mechanically turns off the entire device), a temperature sensor, 2 heating elements and a motor).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Ashes of the past for burger of the future!
I had a garage door opener that started to have problems. The door is rather heavy, and it jerks a bit as it opens. The opener is a double-speed Genie model. Occasionally it would think something was wrong when opening and stop. Unfortunately, there was no option to turn off the double-speed mode. Of course, they also sold a regular-speed model that was exactly the same except for one change on the circuit board. A little searching turned up the solution: Clip the resistor labeled "double-speed" and it cuts the speed in half.
Now the door opens more slowly without any jerking, and it never stops half-way up.
The code for those is up at GitHub. ;-) I just logged out so I'm not logging back in again, damn it. Anyhow, search for one of the script names and add github to the terms and you should be all good to go.
The thing with induction plates is that the central components (power capacitors, switch, coil) must be high-quality, or the whole thing goes up in smoke very fast. Hence they have inherent long lifetime. Of course, manufacturers do not want that, they want people to buy new stuff, not use old stuff forever. What they do is add artificial weak points. Sometime you can find and fix them, and I did so for a generic induction plate.
This plate has a 235V rectifier whose leads are pressing against an aluminum heat-sink. The leads are insulated with PVC-tubing that has a limited lifetime, even more so when heated up, which it is here. When it gets brittle, it stops insulating well, shortening out and blowing the non-replaceable fuse and likely other components. My fix was to saw out the piece of the heat sink that they pressed against. It should also work to replace the tubing with silicone-glass-cloth insulation tubing that has a very long lifetime. While the circuit has some electrolyte capacitors as well, they were all good quality 105C types and should live a long time. They should also not damage the circuit when they fail and hence can be replaced at need.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"It works fine, but only has 3 different wash cycles."
2 more than most people use.
Google has about 79,200 hits for "arduino dishwasher" , I guess you checked those?
What the fuck has become of Slashdot?
I've been working in HVAC for a while and have been noticing that I could replace the control boards with small microcontrollers or the like and some simple hardware. I'd been considering using a RasPi but have since found something that I think works far better. I've got to wait till I get a good number of bad boards on several different systems before I can finish the project but so far we're pretty sure that it can be done easily. This will be easily adapted to washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, etc.
At least not i your home. I have a friend who's a forensic fire investigator and do oyu know the number one thing to burn your house down? Dishwasher. It gets hot, uses a lot of electricity, and is filled with pressurized water. As one who ignore "no user serviceable parts" I took this one to heart.
Sarcasm? Plastic melting heat + alcohol = no more dishwasher, house, kids, dog, and car.
They're called ears. If they're not getting a signal, then the wash cycle has completed.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
My Braun had an AA battery with soldering tabs. As the battery fits snugly in its place, it wasn't much work to modify it for regular AA batteries, so now I have cheap replacements. It's also fun to use a non-rechargeable 1.5 volter to overclock it from the usual 1.2 V.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
http://www.northerntool.com/sh...
This plate has a 235V rectifier whose leads are pressing against an aluminum heat-sink.
I first read this to mean an intentional electrical contact. I once fixed a kettle by soldering contacts that were originally held together by simple pressure, after they had developed oxidation issues.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
[...] or before you know it they'll be finding a way to put DRM on dishwashers.
The fiends!
Dish Rinse Management! How diabolical!
It takes marginally more time to completely wash a dish than it does to rinse it and put it in the machine.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Here, let me fix your life.
https://www.google.com/search?q=kitchen+timer&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiltbaQ7_rJAhVR8GMKHZvxCq0Q_AUICCgC
Buy one and use it.
manuals have the cycle sequence in them. they will also usually have pictures of the circuit boards, and always parts list. if the $1200 model by the same OEM (Sears makes nothing, they buy from OEMs and have the items rebranded) has what looks like the same control PCB, but most of the pinouts are not used by the control panel, it might happen.
waterproofing issues might make it dodgy to try and take the buttons external.
but you don't think there are going to be 10 different control boards between Sears and the OEM, do you? really? these things stop for two minutes at each install station on the assembly line. they are not going to customize in a production run. and at the parts store, there are many crosses to one box with one control board in it.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
what do you thing all those Option -01 -02 -05 -11 -17 means on that Tektronix or HP scope?
it's all software tickles. you buy an upgrade while availiable, you just enter a code at a special menu screen.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
My girlfriend washes the dishes by hand and uses the dishwasher for storing dishes since the cabinets are full.
Well, it is sort-of intentional contact after the PVC tubing has degraded...
Your example (silver plating, I expect, but tin-plating can also work) is another time-honored way to implement planned obsolescence. Sometimes it backfires. For example WD hat problem with silver-plated contacts in hard-drives in Russia, since they have more sulfur in the air there due to pollution. As a result, the drives failed too early. Of course nobody honest would ever silver-plate PCB contacts. Gold plating is not really much more expensive and far, far superior.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I know an old mainframe tech who would "clip a resistor" to "upgrade" a system from one clock speed to a faster speed. This was also in the days when 1K of RAM was a rather sizable card.
Now if you have a HiTech Flash 4 RC radio, an early computer radio in 72mhz, one can "upgrade" to a Flash 5 by adding a couple switches, and jumping certain pads on the board. The firmware is already loaded.
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Maybe its like a car wash where you have the Basic Wash that is programmed to leave all the road salt still sticking to your car up to the That Women Washing a Car in "Cool Hand Luke" level?
It is all the same wash only if you pay for the higher levels you get more neon lights that flash "drip cycle" and "spray on wax" or "Ooohhh, that gal doesn't know what she is doing . . ." to which Paul Newman snarls "she sure as heck does" and then he has to eat all of those hardboiled eggs to get back the respect of George Kennedy who is the ring leader among the prisoners in the chain gang.
No? OK, didn't think so.
Men know that dishwashers sterilize the dishes because the dryer coil does double duty as a "hot water booster" to raise the water temperature to well above the pitiful lukewarm level that regulations allow for the water heater. Even if little flecks of dried food are still stuck to the dishes, those food particles are safe because they have been autoclaved.
Women, on the other hand, always manage to find those tiny flecks of dried food that are invisible to male visual receptors, and they will rewash every last dish that you carefully loaded into the dishwasher.
My wife has heard for the 100th time that I once dated the woman responsible for the lukewarm, bacterial-growing output of the water heater by helping draft the legislation meant to prevent kids from getting scalded from the hot water spigot. But dishes get washed by hand anyway.
I had this discussion about the "ethics" of using TSP during a dishwasher discussion with my neighbors who attend synagogue and observe the Holy Days. I suggested the TSP thing (haven't tried it yet myself) but warned that this has to be balanced against ones conscience regarding the Environment.
I was told, "Thanks for the tip and not a problem. We are supposed to write our sins down on a piece of paper on the Day of Atonement, and I can just add this one to the list . . ."
Not in my dishwasher, not in my clothes washer, not in my clothes dryer. My stuff uses control systems, but they use electricity to control the device at hand. There are motors, sensors (thermal or go/no-go microswitches) and heating elements. And that's it. No software. Even the timers are motors that click away on a quarter-second basis. I have an SDR that can capture all of the power/gas smartmeters in a two block radius, but the other appliances only kick out electromagnetic radiation (noise), and don't respond to it in return. You can try to hack them if you want (go ahead, knock yourself out), but apart from attacking the power line that they are attached to, or physically adjusting the controls (they are mechanical, not electric/electronic), I don't think you will get too far.
My wife's favorite beverage is unsweetened cocoa powder stirred into hot milk. It leaves this chocolate residue on all the tea cups that doesn't come off.
When we first got married, the solution to my wife hand (re-)washing every single cup coming out of the dishwasher was Cascade Complete.
Or Cascade Complete used to do the job on the cocoa cups, but it stopped doing it, I blamed the dishwasher as getting old, but then I read about the phosphate thing.
You see, we have really hard water, but I got tired of paying for salt and lugging it into the basement and loading the softener, so I run un-softened water and just replace the water heater when it limes up with un-softened water rather than when it rusts out from softened water.
Do you think using a few teaspoons of TSP instead of sending tens of pounds of salt into the wastewater is a good tradeoff? Or does Gaia not negotiate?
Don't get me started about Energy Star dehumidifiers!
(channeling Krusty from the Simpsons) Isn't anyone here going to get me started?
The Energy Star rating of dehumidifiers is a fraud because dehumidifiers are rated under continuous operation at a much higher level of humidity that anyone should have in their basement (who as it at 80 deg let alone 80 deg and 60 percent humidity in their basement?).
Furthermore, a dehumidifier should use a humidistat to cycle the unit on and off to maintain a reasonable level of dryness rather than run all the time to claw at the air and try to make it desert dry. Dehumidifiers these days are using constant-fan, which during the compressor off time evaporates all of the moisture sticking to the coils with surface tension that you paid for electricity to condense during the on time. This can cut the efficiency by half and is not accounted for in the Energy Star Standard. The Florida Solar Energy Center explains this effect for central air conditioning and suggests some "hacks" to increase their moisture removal, but I cannot interest anyone at FSEC let alone EPA-Energy Star in this for dehumidifiers.
Well, I guess Energy Star has "caught wise" to this issue because they started notating in their ratings which units run the fan continuously and which ones don't. But those clever manufacturers, they are running long run-on times of the fan that does the same thing as the units that cycle the fan off.
The only thing I can guess is that the dehumidifier companies are having a hard time with refrigerant leaks, and maybe they think corrosion is a problem and the fan run on time is to prevent moisture from being in contact with the coils 100% of the time. Manufacturers used to have 5 year warranties on the "sealed" system that are now reduced to 1 year, and manufacturers do not honor their warranty. They will not repair a leaked unit, ever. They give you a coupon towards the purchase of a new unit that won't cover the recycling fee required for disposing of the old unit in many municipalities.
I don't know. No one from EPA, the manufacturers, to Focus on Energy will talk about any of this and what can be done. It is energy conservation theatre of acting like they care about the environment rather than doing anything effective.
For anyone out their that cares about electricity usage and wants to hack this, the suggestion from people who have tried is to find the humidity sensor, remove it from the cabinet and put it remote from the humidity given off by the wet coils. This lengthens the on/off cycle time which will reduce the fan run-on losses in efficiency more than the larger swings in room humidity reduce the unit efficiency.
What I do is look at a humidity gauge in the basement every night and program an hour or maybe two of continuous running using the timer mode, checking the number of pints (pounds) of water in the bucket against the electric use logged with a Kill-a-Watt. I can get as much as 4 lbs moisture removed per kWHr vs 1.8 with the normal automatic mode of the unit.
But gosh is this labor intensive. I am acting as one of the "valve boys" tending a Newcomen steam engine before the invention of valve gear. This is the freakin' 21st Century and I am operating the dehumidifier like an 18th Century mine pumping engine. Thanks, EPA!
It's cheaper to develop a single machine, then provide multiple, different, levels of capability, based on the market you are aiming for.
you're supposed to remove/scrape off any large pieces of food before putting dishes into the dishwasher. Doing that should prevent any clogging. No "pre-washing" is generally necessary, though many dishwashers will have trouble with certain gunky stuff (solidified eggs, peanut butter, etc.), and rinsing them may be helpful.
Yes: Some kinds of stuck-on food may not come off in one cycle - after which heated drying may bake it on sufficiently that additional cycles won't touch it. You pretty much have to scrape it off anyhow, with more difficulty than if you had hand-washed in the first place.
Also: Pre-loading hot-rinsing off any large clot of solidified of grease, reducing the total amount on the dishes, prevents said grease from using up all the dish soap in suspending (some of) it, leaving none to lift off grease-bound particles. (Some of the better machines will do this for you, but the new water-limiting regulations are driving manufacturers to drop that cycle.)
I use what I call the "Star Trek" method: Knock off the bigger cling-ons, then let the automation handle the details.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Swap out the controller board by ripping it out and replacing it with a 60 year old relays and resistors controller. The only problem with that is 50 years from now SWMBO will be harping on you to replace it, and you will be saying "but it still works great!"
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
is employ a mexican !
Real hackers will put a Raspberry Pi or a Beaglebone Black in there. It ain't worth hacking if it ain't running Linux.
As far as I've seen, all kitchen appliances are the same - but they are the same as in VHS players and CD players are the same.
They have the same components, but they keep coming out with control boards that aren't compatible at all.
It's probably easier to put in a raspberry pi with a relay board than to try to hack the control board.
It's not like a dishwasher is very advanced. There's some water level sensors, valves for letting water in, pumps (one around, and one out?), heating element and hopefully a temperature sensor that can be read. Do whatever program you feel like. How hard can it be?
That said, I'm still confused _no_ appliances (except iKettle) talks wifi (or anything, like BLE or zwave) - other appliances like TV and receivers have been talking to the user over the LAN for many years now.
That said, my next appliance to hack will be my Tea Maker.
Then you are not consuming enough.
Kein Bier ist auch keine Antwort, goes the German saying: "No beer isn't an answer, either".
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Have you tried a singularity ? These things are reputed to dissolve anything.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Has any number of cycles and also has the AI built in to select the appropriate one. Only downside is she sometimes wants me to help. On the plus side she then adds an extra mode that's not so much geared towards washing but usually cleans my mind and pipes....
LOL
Oh, hackers, not tweakers. I mis-read the headline.
The extra programs are for making you give them more money for nothing much.
You already hacked the system by getting the cheap one.
sudo ergo sum
Geez, guys, where's your sense of adventure? I thought this was a place for hackers to gather. Instead I see a bunch of old fuddy-duddys going "why ever would you want to do that?" or "don't touch that, it might be important!" Hang your heads in shame.
Dude, I know nothing of hacking dishwasher micro controllers, but I think you went to the wrong place. Maybe the AARP forums might have more adventurous souls.
/*
Fucking thing runs silent, but when done, BEEP BEEP BEEP
Apparently their engineers didn't understand the concept behind building a silent dishwasher.
Worked as a 3rd level support engineer for Xerox back from 1999-2003. There was a line of multifunction devices - the Document Centre. Some models were basically the same thing - in one case, the Document Centre 232 and 240. The difference between the two? 32 pages per minute and 40 pages per minute. Same machine - but with the right admin password on the user interface (the control panel), you could turn a 32 page per minute machine into a 40 page per minute machine and jack the price up by several thousand dollars as well as enable some other features that customers were made to pay for.
I had an old cheap washing machine with a mechanical timer. There were a normal and a permanent press cycle printed around the dial, and room for another cycle which was blank. Exploratory surgery revealed that the timer was in fact labelled with connections for a two speed motor which would provide a gentle cycle, as well as a gentler spin for the permanent press cycle, but this cheapo model had only the one speed motor. So, one cannibalized light dimmer later, the machine had two motor speeds and a third cycle to fill out the dial nicely. I'm pretty sure the difference in price between the two cycle and three cycle machines would have been more than whatever I spent for the dimmer.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I know of a piece of industrial electronics that only needs a jumper soldered in to become the more expensive version. It's actually manufactured as the more expensive version and then the jumper is cut just before packaging.
Nothing will cut through the greasey grimey shleck baked onto my oven.
Not toxic oven cleaner, not Brillo pads, not the self-cleaning feature (which uses exceptionally high temps to turn shit straight to ash). Anything that removes it only does so by removing the underlying steel and enamel of the oven itself.
your oven has evolved its own protective coating, and can be expected to survive longer than its parents did.
Darwinism in action.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The thing with induction plates is that the central components (power capacitors, switch, coil) must be high-quality, or the whole thing goes up in smoke very fast. Hence they have inherent long lifetime. Of course, manufacturers do not want that, they want people to buy new stuff, not use old stuff forever. What they do is add artificial weak points. Sometime you can find and fix them, and I did so for a generic induction plate.
This plate has a 235V rectifier whose leads are pressing against an aluminum heat-sink. The leads are insulated with PVC-tubing that has a limited lifetime, even more so when heated up, which it is here. When it gets brittle, it stops insulating well, shortening out and blowing the non-replaceable fuse and likely other components. My fix was to saw out the piece of the heat sink that they pressed against. It should also work to replace the tubing with silicone-glass-cloth insulation tubing that has a very long lifetime. While the circuit has some electrolyte capacitors as well, they were all good quality 105C types and should live a long time. They should also not damage the circuit when they fail and hence can be replaced at need.
i find in contemporary appliances, very often the failure is in the digital display, often the flat panel itself.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Please stop with y our microaggressions. Womanual Cycle, please.
Zanussi ZRB 327 WO manual https://www.manualscat.com/en/...
i don't know which is funnier here, wo-manual or manual scat. neither one is all that funny, though.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Also a good place to hide a weak point. My induction plate does only have some LEDs though and they are easily replaced. (Well, once you make a triangle-point screwdriver to get it open in the first place, but that took me all of 5 minutes.)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So you're saying that washing dishes is women's work, then?
What phone and apps are you using? I can't think of a way to make that work on iOS or stock Android. Please tell us more as this seems like a really cool set up.
It's more hardware dependent, not software, so any device with an NFC antenna (mine's from 2013), which a few years ago got added to more and more devices for contactless payments and wireless charging. In stock Android it defaults to enabled (some users turn NFC off to limit battery drain). Just search your preferred app store for NFC, there are multiple apps that trigger actions and provide nfc tools.
For Apple, sorry, last I knew it wasn't available on their devices, new ones might have it for limited payments, but not available to developers yet according to a superficial google search. This is a case where the hardware might now start to be offered without software accessibility.
Users should demand standard interfaces between machines... your washer and dryer should transfer clothes when clean and wet without user intervention, regardless of make/model. General purpose robots for things that either aren't exactly repeated or don't occur very often, standardized machines for things that are repeated frequently.
You know - I am complaining about nanny regulations - not the cops. Non of my friends that are cops give a s*** about how much water and electricity I use. And you might notice that the security issues here are a little different than in the middle east. (Was that a drunk post?)
I'm all for the limited government - hard to see the need for the 48% of the economy we have now - making us much more of a socialist country than the Russians (at 35%) . How about 5%?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You know - I am complaining about nanny regulations - not the cops. Regulations are worthless unless someone is there to enforce them.
I'm all for the limited government - hard to see the need for the 48% of the economy we have now - making us much more of a socialist country than the Russians (at 35%) . How about 5%?
Do you like 5 because it's less than 48? Or does 5 have a special meaning to you? If 5 is good, is 4 better? what about 3? If you argue for 5%, could I use your same arguments against you to argue for 2%? You seem to agree that zero is bad, so why is 5 the magic number?
What software do you us on your phone to do the automation?