Obligatory:
The smarter the house the dumber the owner.
(not to bully these people who build it consciously themselves, automation and sensors can add many fun and useful features)
It can be done right: local only connections (no cloud), segmented vlan for iot devices with strict firewall rules, Internet access blocked for anything that doesn’t need it, etc.
Unfortunately that takes a lot of knowledge and effort. The cloud based devices that phone home every few minutes are preconfigured and just work, so most people will just use that and not think about it.
If you’re worried about the devices themselves that’s why there are radio protocol standards that decidedly don’t use the internet, like zigbee, z-wave, and now matter.
Being pedantic for a second. Matter isn’t a radio protocol. Thread is the protocol designed to have Matter run on it.
well technically you can push matter through ethernet or wifi as well, but you’re right
The communication method isn’t relevant to its security. If you are a house in the suburbs, a WiFi device in your house you isn’t going to be hacked directly by someone wardriving. The wifi device is going to be hacked by someone coming in over your router which is cat 5/6 Ethernet.
Similarly any other wireless device like zigbee will be hacked over the Internet. The packets will come through your zigbee gateway just like they go through your wifi gateway.
Even better if the IoT devices doesn’t even connect to your WiFi or LAN… Zigbee devices for example.
It always seems like a lot of effort to avoid pressing a light switch
But once you set it up you never have to switch anything ever again
You always want a light on when someone enters a room? Always, no exceptions?
Sometimes I go in the kitchen and I don’t want all the lights in my face. Other times I need the extra light. Until home automation can read my mind, a physical switch is easiest.
I had a pair of physical switches that were motion sensing in my last house basement. Very handy for coming down with a laundry basket and having the lights turn on when going over to the washing machine. No connection to the Internet at all.
Home automation is so far beyond just “motion -> light”.
I have profiles of profiles for different reactions based on time of day and different conditions. The only light that comes on no questions asked is the kitchen light and even that is dependent on the time of day – IE at night it only turns on to 50%. You’d be amazed at how much you can simply with a few different conditionals and not much else. Highly implore you to head over to the Home Assistant page/wiki/forum/community/subreddit – its a VAST community.
I miss my android notification LED so I just went ahead and built my own little LED box based on WLED and HA. The app on my phone sends the notification conditional to the HA server in my basement which then sends the signal to the WLED fixture over WIFI to change colors and patterns. When notifications go back to zero the pattern returns to normal. Did i mention the change over takes 30 seconds? No jarring vibrations, sounds, or signals. It’s all just smooth and silent. I love it.
I’ve got some home automation. I wrote my own stuff with a lcars style javaScript front end. Home Assistant couldn’t do what I wanted when I last looked at it 5 years ago.
Sometimes you want light and sometimes not despite the time of day. Then there’s my wife who usually wakes up much earlier and has vastly different preferences on light. So 2am means me with lights at full blast because I’m up late working on a project or no to dim lights if it’s wife waking up for some water or she wants brighter lights to unload the dishwasher. I turn lights on full while making breakfast for the kids. Kids don’t like light when they first wake up so I turn them down after breakfast is on the table and I go wake them up.
“Never touching a switch” isn’t possible without mind reading and knowing the context.
Until it inevitably goes wrong!
Alexa, play I’m a loooser by Limp Bizkit.
Please drink a verification can.
I have no mouth and I need to drink.
Adding “moose biscuits” to the shopping list
Unless they use home assistant and non-IP devices 😉
Car enthusiasts: Check out this list of mods that’s so long it’d need legal paper to print out. I even have stickers with the chassis code on it and a Japanese license plate on the front so you know it’s JDM.
Mechanics: I drive a stock 2000 Crown Victoria.
If I could make my Model S a “dumb” car, I would in an instant. As it is, retrofit-electrifications are still really clunky, infinite pits of expensive despair.
My absolute dream car is a dual-motor FD RX-7.
I have a 2012 Civic and a 1997 Prelude and my favorite thing about both of them is the lack of distractions. The Civic gives you a radio and tells you the MPG. The Prelude doesn’t even shift your gears for you lol (it’s also missing a radio but that’s low on the list of repair/maintenance priorities)
I really am dreading the day both of those cars die and there are no cars from before ~2014 left to buy anymore. I really hope dumb cars make a comeback the way dumb phones kind of have. I’d love to see Toyota build the 1993 Camry again.
Oh and when I poke fun at enthusiasts, I’m including myself. I really thought about buying a Japanese style license plate with the BB6 chassis code on it. Until I realized that I’d cringe if I saw that in the wild and so used my better judgment.
As the owner of a German car from 91 with the wide license plate mount molded into the bumper; The urge to get a sauerkraut plate with something car-nerdy on it is strong, but I’m still resisting, for now.
I put a german plate on my 85 buick park ave in 2005 or so (random plate, no coded messages) and it was fresh as fuck
Evergreen
Remember! The S in IoT stands for security 😎
Internet of ThingSecurity?
There is no F in security!
Theres no crying in IoT
There’s no f in weigh
The IoT needs an ID system, an IDIoT.
3.66x30 = 109.8gb.
Congratulations, your washing machine just wasted a tenth of your allowed 1tb Comcast data cap!
Data caps are reason for violent revolution
Do you guys have data cap in America?
It depends on how big a monopoly your local internet provider has. Mine has a total monopoly. We have a data cap but we can pay 50$ extra a month to get rid of it. It’s a total scam.
50$ ?! Wow, that’s absurd! In my country, I’m paying 20$ a month for my 1Gbit connection without datacap, and that’s considered an expensive plan
America and canada both have absolutely horrible home internet and cellular data oligopolies. It’s honestly shameful…
I was shocked to learn Canada had data caps.
I implored the FCC to prohibit caps when Comcast wanted to pilot them.
Now the caps are here to stay. Scam!
Im really wishing America would pull a British Telecom. It looks like it worked out really well.
Some do, some don’t.
I do. Xfinity has a regional monopoly here.
Depends on where you live, what company you use, and what plan if theirs you’re on.
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Some in canada still have data caps, albeit on their lowest tier plans usually
I don’t on att
currently
AT&T seems to be in negotiation with Satan right now and can’t come to an agreement so for whatever reason the past few years they have dropped their data caps.
I hate having to use them but all my other options are shit. Sure as hell not going to use the other companies in the area. But all that said, my household rarely uses more than 5 or 600 GB per month.
Data caps? What is this, 2001? Hell it’s been over a decade since I saw a cap on my phone’s data let alone home internet.
Get yourself a better ISP, this one sounds like it’s fleecing you!
You think people can just choose to go get better isp’s? LOLLLLLLLLL I needed a good laugh today
LG? Yeah, they’re eavesdropping and selling the data to advertisers.
You might be right. It is 3.57GB upload not download.
That’s a shit ton of data though, l how could it be gathering that much
That would be roughly 340 kB/s
High quality mp3 or low quality wav.
It’s analyzing your skid marks trying to generate a faithful recreation of your farts.
It’s the only excuse.
If that’s what they want, they can come suck the pure stuff right out of the source.
ANY type of sensor.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOR a very reliable torrent seeder for firmware updates.
It has a microphone just constantly streaming audio back to LG that LG adds to a database and has a bot analyze for useful info later. Keywords like laundry or TV or even product names of LG and its competitors
Washing Machines don’t need to be Internet enabled.
Am I crazy, or is this trend of making random appliances and devices internet connected fucking ridiculous. I’d much rather that manufacturers focus their R&D money on making appliances that last longer or can be repaired. Adding wifi and shitty ‘smart’ features to these things is just a gimmick.
Gimmicks is how you justify planned obsolescence.
They don’t want devices that last longer, they want to make something that seems like a neat gimmick that makes you pick them over the competitor, and they want you to come back and buy another in 5-10 years right after the old one fails about 3 months past expiration of the manufacturer’s warranty.
It’s a gimmick and is scary as fuck. Look at open cameras like http://www.insecam.org/en/byrating/ and imagine people using the bare minimum setup on their devices out of ignorance and getting wrecked by scammers and creeps.
Even Amazon employees were busted looking into ring camera users personal cameras,searching for cameras called “bedroom”, “bathroom”, etc.
Why doesn’t the website support HTTPS?
Irony
I’m pretty sure CORS is why.
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Change their passwords. That’s called white hat hacking.
I was looking for a bbq thermometer yesterday and all I could find was smart wifi/Bluetooth thermometers. Why the fuck does a thermometer need wifi/Bluetooth?!?
I could see that being useful. Would be nice for barbecuing in bad weather. Keep an eye on temps without having to go brave the elements unnecessarily.
The weak don’t deserve BBQ.
The weak invented bbq.
Spoiled techies scared of the rain?
Not needing a wire to go to the probe part of it is pretty handy. Likewise, a washing machine that can send a push notification to my phone for “Hey, laundry is done.” sounds slightly useful to me as a forgetful person.
I just set a timer on my phone when I start my laundry.
I’d need a reminder that I haven’t done laundry for too long, so I don’t run out of clothes
I always forget my laundry and then it gets smelly. Same with drying I forget to take it out and then it becomes all wrinkled
Set a timer on your phone
Lol that’s true feel stupid idk why I never thought of that
My problem with timers is it always goes off when I’m in the middle of something, so I turn it off because it’s annoying and then forget for another 2 or more hours that I needed to get it out. I remember faster without a timer to silence for some reason
I have one of these but I keep forgetting to use it.
Thats are actually a pretty practical smart device. A smart instant read thermometer would be near useless, but the ones you’re describing replace the type that you’d leave in a hunk of meat while it roasts / rotisseries / smokes / slowcooks for hours at a time. In that case it’s super handy to be able to check the temperature to make sure it’s still at target without having to go back to the kitchen or out into the cold / rain, and they’ll actively notify your phone if either the internal temperature goes out of range or the ambient oven temperature does.
My Bluetooth thermometer connects to my home assistant server and sends me notifications to my phone when I reach temp. It goovee app does it too, but now I’m off the cloud shit.
To me, a “smart” laundry machine should just be “derrr, I can click a button on this app which turns it on!”
Once it grabs my clothes from the basket, sorts then by colors/whites/delicates/etc, runs them through a way cycle, puts them in to dry and runs a cycle on that, then presses and folds them for me… THEN maybe I’ll consider putting it on the network.
Maybe if it does all those things you should buy it a nice apron and see how it does in the kitchen.
It will have an addon that binds it to your household. It comes in a form of a gold ring and costs half your money.
It can make sense if the dryer can talk to the power meter, and only turn on if the electricity is cheap.
It’s a reccuring fad. In the 80s, ever household appliance used to get a digital clock as “feature”.
How the hell else am I supposed to know the washer is done from the next room?
/s
My ancient washing machine already has a notification system, no smart features needed. When it’s making an awful noise it’s still washing, when I can hear myself think again it’s finished.
Yours doesn’t sing the song of it’s people?
That’s actually a cool little gimmick of some of the smart features. Downloading extra finish jingles.
Of course these are only a few bytes (or so I’d hope). And limited to what they do. Still sometimes they have seasonal selections. It’s cute and gimmicky and totally unnecessary, sure. But that’s the charm.
I lived in a house where the whole floor was shaking when the washing machine was spinning.
So when the floor stopped shaking the laundry was ready.
You’re joking but my laundry is in my basement and the app notification really is the only way I know it’s done.
Set a timer
Washing machines do not operate on a fixed timer. They show you a suggestion but if the load of clothes is lighter or heavier the wash cycle will take varying amounts of time. I can’t hear mine either and rely on the notification on my phone.
They do if you set a timer and don’t do the auto sense setting
Yea but why would you do that? You want the washer to run longer for heavier loads than lighter loads.
I agree.
The problem comes from wanting something “simple” like “tell my phone when the dryer is done.” Because we lack anything resembling a “home wireless notification protocol”, the alternatives are practically non-starters for a range of reasons. Assuming that we need a wireless leg to the user’s device, here’s the state of the art:
- SMS requires the dryer to also be a cellphone
- Bluetooth range is too short to be useful for everyone
- A private dryer network would require your phone/device on multiple WiFi networks at once
- Email or any other online chat protocol requires the dryer be online too
- Phone app that only talks across the home LAN WiFi (e.g. 192.168.x.x) requires user to understand IP networking*
- Packet radio would work, but is non-private, would be a disaster in apartment buildings, and nobody has a receiver
A solution that uses a phone app that talks to an online service, and a WiFi connected device that does the same is the path of least resistance. And I say this as someone who really doesn’t like this fact.
(*A device that can display a QR code to auto-configure a phone app would work a treat, but dot-matrix displays cost)
There’s zwave and zigbee. Downside is that you need a central hub, alot of hubs I’ve seen (cough hue cough) only really work with their products. It’s a cool technology that has been ruined by corps refusing to play ball with each other, even when in different market segments.
The only two I can see that could possibly benefit from this technology are ovens and fridges.
Ovens: Turn them on 5/10 minutes before getting home to preheat, also useful to make sure it’s turned off if you go out. My mother and I have had plenty of times when we go, “Did I turn it off?”
Fridge: keeps track of what you do amt don’t have. Of you go out, even with a list, there’s bound to be something you forget. Also could be useful for recipes. Unless it’s basic stuff, I usually always use recipes, my memory is horrendous, having that on a big screen fridge would save the hassle of having to wash your hands, pick up the phone, put the phone down, wash hands again. The recipes could also be generated from what you have. I think, and I could be wrong here, samsung is trying this.
Anything else seems really dumb though. A washing machine? If you leave it on when you go out, it’ll turn off anyway. It makes even less sense when you consider that you have to manually put things in anyway.
Hpw does the fridge know what you have though?
It’ll be like those minibars in hotels which charge you as soon as you pick up something
I just set up grocy for this, no smart fridge needed. I have a barcode scanner, then scan everything I buy, and again when I use it
Camera on the inside?
A fridge keeping track of inventory is a massive PITA until all food has NFC chips in it and that raises further concerns.
I’d rather have a barcode scanner over the trash can if I’m gonna connect that much. Or even better, a full on camera. Then I can use it to scan barcodes on stuff as I throw it in the trash, plus semi-important mail and receipts.
On the did I turn it off part, I’d always be worried if the app actually did turn it off, or is it stuck, or did the app randomly turn it on in the middle of the night while updating, or did someone maliciously hack and turn on my oven, etc etc.
as someone that forgets that they’re in the middle of doing laundry frequently, it was great getting notifications when it was done. I rented a place for a bit that had a smart washer, I actually really miss that.
maintenance and such I’m sure were worse, and I’d much rather it be all local and have open apis, but fundamentally, having a connected washer is actually really nice
I’ve tried vibration sensors on the current not connected wadher, but I can’t get anything reliable enough to be useful
100% agreed. The only appliance I’d ever want with that kind of feature is an oven, just in case, but otherwise, I don’t need everything in my house to be internet connected 24/7. That just leaves way too many ways for people to mess with you if any exploits and stuff are found for the smart things you have.
don’t even need it on an oven just put a timer function on to turn it off automatically at a set time like a microwave that’s why I love using the oven setting on a microwave and hate actual ovens
What the fUCK is oven setting on a microwave? LOL. They don’t even cook food the same way
there’s microwaves that are also convection ovens you just switch between the modes
A better question is why would you connect a washing machine to the Internet. Also curious what model it is.
We have LG washing machine, fridge, and dishwasher. All of our original appliances crapped out within 2 years of each other, and were all around the same age and original to the house. LG was the least shitty, review-wise, in the price range with the features we wanted; they all of them came with WiFi modules. It appears modern appliances are now like cars - if you want certain features, you’re forced to also get features you don’t want.
In any case, the marketting justification for each was:
- dishwasher: download additional washing modes, like rinse-hold. Alerts when the machine is done. Remote start.
- washing machine: alerts when the machine is done. Remote start.
- fridge: I don’t recall (it was the first to go)
None of ours has been given access to the WiFi, so I just count it as a tax.
We also replaced our garage doors recently; the contractor literally didn’t carry any opener models without WiFi. I had to source those myself.
The most frustrating thing about all this wasn’t the WiFi, though; it was that the cost to repair each of them was 80% the cost of a new appliance, and most of that was parts. I’d do it again the same way. For comparison, the one appliance I’m trying to not replace is the oven, and we’ve had to have someone come out twice in as many years to fix it. In retrospect, it would have been cheaper to just replace that, too.
I get furious just thinking about the waste. Sure, the new appliances are better - the dishwasher is far quieter, is larger inside, and has better drawer geometry, for instance. But we would have been happy in our ignorance if it would have been cost effective to fix rather than replace.
None of the originals were LG, BTW. I don’t know how robust these will be. The old appliances lasted 20, but I’m not naive enough to think modern appliances will last that long. If I get anywhere near close to 10 years without a major repair, I’ll be thrilled.
In what world would someone want to remote start laundry or dishwashing‽ Ovens would actually benefit from that, but if the dishwasher wasn’t ready to run last time I was touching it it’s not ready now!
I could see remotely starting a washing machine being useful in some cases. For example, if I need to get laundry done today but have to work, I can put the clothes in the washer in the morning and then start it in the afternoon so that my wet clothes aren’t sitting in the washer for 6 hours while I’m at work.
Even my super basic washer has a delayed start timer that solves that issue without wifi modules or whatever. Then again insurance doesn’t cover a water leak or oven fire if I run stuff when I’m away so I never do that.
I want to let you know that I appreciate the interrobang. Best punctuation mark ever
How do you access this on a phone keyboard?
‽ Nevermind I found it!
Not at all on ThumbKey, sadly. It’s in most other keyboards, though.
Eh it would be useful for me… I live a very… dynamic life, and I don’t always know when I’ll be home, so it would be useful, once I know that, to be able to start a wash and find it ready when I come back, with no bad odors.
Ok fair, I usually have a day of recovery somewhere in the week lol. Dishwasher though baffles me.
Day of recovery is for recovering, not chores!
Solar power.
Leave for work when it’s darker, start the appliance when it’s maximum sun to take advantage of free electricity.
Dishwashers I can see. Load it up after dinner, then have it run at some point overnight. Could just start it before you go to bed though, so it’s a wash for me really
Yeah but you can just run it then, it dries them automatically
There’s energy use, then there’s water use. The water I use per dish goes down the more I load up the dishwasher. The less water I use per dish, the less wastewater I create.
I’d rather load it up fully than run it when it’s convenient. At that point, I might as well just wash by hand but
I fully respect that. I just run it when I finish filling it up I just run it. No need to remote start, I’m already there.
My spouse worked a bit in the appliance repair sector. A lot of the upper tier appliances share a lot of their internals with the lower tier cheaper models. You can easily see this for yourself by looking up maintenance manuals for expensive and cheaper models, many of the PCBs and spare parts are identical as it makes their supply chain easier.
Sure, one may have a fancy LCD screen and a GUI, but why pay a premium for it when it washes your clothes with the same motor model as the cheap one?
The entire WiFi feature set seems like something that appliance makers thought that consumers would appreciate, but I personally don’t see the use. If I’m standing in front of a dishwasher, I have to manually unload and load it so it’s pointless for me to start it with my phone when I’m literally standing in front of it.
Yea the remote start on all of these seem weird to me. The only use case I can think of is if you’re leaving for an hour and want the dryer stuff to be done and warm exactly when you get home. But even then you shouldn’t run those appliances when the house is empty and leaving wet cloth In a confined area isn’t great either since it can stink them up.
If these appliances didn’t phone home, I’d probably use the wireless. I do have most things in the house hooked up to Home Assistant (all z-wave, all local), and it’d be nice (if not adding much practical value) to have appliances represented. For example, when the washing machine is done, it “sings us the song of its people,” a small operetta of which we’re both sick. Turn that off, and we can’t tell when its done and time to swap it out. It’d be a little nice to be able to hook that into HA and fully control notifications.
The irony is that, even if I did enable the wireless, it’s only through a shitty bespoke LG app, and I’d still not be able to connect it to HA.
But, yeah… the only thing I care about remote starting is the slow cooker, but not enough to give LG that telemetry.
100% same. Honestly if someone figured out a way to cost effectively make a retrofit kit you could wire into cheaper/simpler/older machines and then tie it all together in something like HomeKit, I would jump on it.
dishwasher: download additional washing modes
I just had a stroke.
You might think you’re being edgy and cool, but this is a nice feature unless you want 10000000 buttons on your machine for every conceivable use case.
It really only needs 2 modes: intense and quick. So here goes 2 buttons. A timer to use cheaper power at night can be of some benefit if you have a tariff supporting it. The rest is… unnecessary. And yes, this is my strong opinion of a man with wifi in his dishwasher that will never get connected.
Here you can read about it with morbid fascination.
Doesn’t matter, it’s an LG, You’ll have to buy another one in two years.
Bought LG washer and dryer five years ago with an extended warranty. Didn’t need it. They work great.
I need my phone to send a push notification when the laundry is done instead of going through all the trouble of setting a timer.
My washer and dryer both support internet-connected “smart” features, which I find pretty silly.
However, some water got into the dryer’s interface (touch screen buttons), and we were unable to start it. Connecting it to the internet and using the app to start it was a workaround. Fortunately, the water dried and now the button works again.
So that’s one niche use-case I can think of. I’d just prefer physical buttons that are more reliable, though.
Bitcoin laundering?
I thought about that but I don’t think that would take up data, it would take up power.
I think it was just a washing machine joke
Oh I’m an idiot lol
Dryers have that big plug!
some washing machines have a dryer included, and i guess one could use asics to generate dry heat for this, but im not really sold on this until i disassemble one of those and actually find a mining operation in there. asics could scale better for an “application” like this rather than expecting to find a gfx or mining card in there with pcix lanes or something which would be rather inefficient and finicky in my opinion.
regarding the upload, of course they could run two schemes: mine and also sell whatever they are recording: there could be any type of sensor in there. and it could record constantly. heck maybe its just something dumb like a bug: looking at that dip between 13 and 15oclock: could be it ran during that slot and then some bug made it reupload the last log or some such thing
What about sending power through Internet ? Like this they don’t have to pay the bill.
So that’s what power over Ethernet is!
Most likely it’s got poor security and has been compromised to use as part of a DDOS network. ie. Someone has taken it over to use your bandwidth (and tens of thousands of other people’s) to sell on the dark web as a service to attack others on the internet.
Tfw when you literally got attacked by washing machine
Fucking Gilfoyle
SUCK IT, JIAN YANG!
It also launders crypto
Now I’d want to see the idle power consumption of that machine
This is why I get dumb appliances, the dumber and simpler the better. Yes, I work in tech.
At the risk of sounding like a boomer, I have an app that lets me know when my washing machine is done, it’s called the stopwatch
At risk of sounding like a zoomer, I’d rather have my expensive appliances interface with tech instead of incorporate it.
A device that monitors the washer’s power draw and makes an led green in another room for 30 minutes after the power draw falls is fine. Plus I could use it for way more than a washer.
See this is why I have hope for the future, zoomers are out here having ideas that I’d never even thought of. That’s genius, and I bet you could make that with $20 worth of electronics and two hours on YouTube
This is what I do. Monitor power consumption with home assistant and a 15 buck wifi plug. If the value falls below a certain threshhold for a few minutes, homeassistantt sends a notification to my app.
All local, no cloud, easy, cheap.
Which plugs are you using? I was thinking of getting load detectors for my electrical box
I have Nous A1T with Tasmota firmware (they are available pre-flashed) for the normal power sockets and Shelly 1PM for in-wall Installation. Both work with home assistant flawlessly.
Edit: Shelly tries to communicate with outside servers (cant remember exactly which one, might only be time server and update server, but unsure) so they are in a VLAN without Internet connection)
That is exactly what I did with my dumb washing machine (and dishwasher).
Each has a ZigBee energy monitoring smart plug which is connected to a local Home Assistant instance. Spent an hour or two writing automations based on the power draw reported by the plugs and now I get push notifications that report whenever either machine finishes its cycle (including how long it took).
Maybe some sort of generic bluetooth sticker with some integrated sensors for temperature, sound level, motion, orientation, pressure. Slap that bad boy on the side of your washer, and register it on your phone. Adjust its parameters to alert when conditions are met. Noise and vibration means its going. Use this data to build a fuzzy profile of what a wash cycle looks like in duration, volume, shakiness etc. Alert phone when we think cycle is done.
Smack another sticker inside your fridge. Alert if temperature exceeds x degrees for n minutes.
Boop another onto your stove. Temps above x when youre not cooking mean someone left it on.
Yeet a few more outside. Periodic increases in volume mean the dog is barking when you arent home.
They’re also just nicer and more forgiving to use. You accidentally rip a button off? Chances are, you can wedge it back on, no problem.
Or stick a paperclip in there.
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I’ve had my washer and dryer for 9 years now. I bought slightly better models than the cheapest ones at Home Depot. The washer has a dial for mode, a dial for temperature, a dial for softener, a dial for extra rinse, and some buttons to start and stop it. The dryer has a dial for time, a dial for temperature, a dial for post-dry tumbling, a dial for buzzer volume, and a button to start it. No screens or displays or wifi or bluetooth. They clean and dry my clothes and nothing has ever gone wrong with them. I don’t know why in the world I would ever want ones with more technology in them.
Push notifications are nice. Especially when the washer is uneven. But especially nice just to get a notification when it’s done.
Maintenance reminders too.
Best is when you leave the house with a blanket and a hoodie in the dryer on “remote start” mode. Turn it on when your 10-15 minutes from home and have a hot blanket and hoodie to snuggle up in as soon as you walk in the door.
My washer tells me when it’s running an unbalanced load by making an extremely loud THUNK THUNK THUNK noise and dancing across the floor until it hits the wall.
I don’t need no bluetooth.
See, the old washers are smart washers. They know they’re unbalanced, and they then bang to get your attention while running nervously around your utility room.
I low-key love the little 8-bit-sounding victory songs all the little machines play when they’re done. Makes me feel reminiscent of how I pictured the future when I was a kid… or maybe or beating a very old video game.
Thank you for trying so hard, little rice cooker!
But still, put all that shit on a different subnet or a different network if you can. I use the “guest wifi” network for all our iot devices so i can still access things from the apps when I’m not home, but it’s segregated from our actual internet devices.
So it’s a solution looking for a problem that has already been solved or isn’t much of a problem/is an edge case in the first place.
I bought a house a few years back that came with a washer and dryer. Let’s just say they were “gently used” models from around or before 2008; practically time capsules. The dryer even still had the protective plastic peel on the console. What’s key is that not only were they practically new, but are just dumb, analog, electric appliances. No frills, no digital displays, no IoT, and possibly no micro-controllers of any kind.
These things have given me over eight years of maintenance-free service and now I dread ever having to replace them.
The new one we got recently has a small display for custom presets and easier night scheduling which seems handy enough.
If you want IOT stuff so bad, connect it to a separate network that has no internet connection. You can then interact with most devices with something like home-assistant
In IOT, the “s” stands for security.
But there’s no ‘s’ in - ohhhhh.
They’re catching on to that. A large number of IOT devices simply won’t work if they can’t hit the internet now.
What really pisses me off is stuff like Sonos. They’re networking code is so bad, I literally have to be on the same subnet to use their app on their speakers.
There is absolutely no reason that my washer needs internet access and if I ever purchase a washer and find that it won’t work without an internet connection, that washer is getting returned immediately.
Heh my microwave/oven combo that came with my house, it has wifi capability. I was all NOPE, absolutely not. So I set the clock and went about moving in.
Next day, it’s off by 1 minute. hmm, I must have caught it right near 00. Next day it’s off by 2 minutes.
Looking through for options to turn off the clock, NOPE.
It came with the house so i can’t return it. Dual Oven/Micro combos are expensive as hell. So I can either Have a clock in my kitchen that’s perpetually wrong, set the time on it every day, or put it on an IOT isolation network.
Microwave/Oven is the most useless integrated appliance.
At least my washing machine would be able to bug me that it’s done and remind me that it has been sitting for a couple of hours with wet clothes.
There is absolutely no reason that my washer needs internet access
Need to function at a basic level? Agree
Need it to, say, notify me that my load is done if I’m on the other side of my property or out in town? Legitimately useful feature for my ADHD riddled ass
It’s called a timer
Cries in myQ
It's possible that it had some vulnerability which was automatically exploited by one of her majesty's secret services (perhaps with help from their US counterparts) to make it a component of their covert infrastructure.
Sounds outlandish, but this was happening in 2010:
They deserve medals for pioneering amazing technologies and methods… and a jail cell to display them in.
Absurd and effective
How come no one is mentioning the background face?
That’s the unabomber
That’s Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, famous for using his hatred of modern technology as an excuse for murdering people
And not even relevant people. Dude declared civilization had problems (sure), announced the answer was basically becoming Amish (what), pointed a finger at the top of national and corporate hierarchies (okay), and then carefully exploded a bunch of university professors. Crazy fucking prick.
But people love a narrative, so all that gets glossed over by jackasses who want a contrarian icon.
Or that most of the usage is in the ‘upload’ category
If it’s the same amount every day (roughly), it’s probably trying to install an update over and over and failing.
Slight variations from other usual IoT spyware behaviour and update version sizes changing between minor versions.
