this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
691 points (87.5% liked)
Technology
60058 readers
2807 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I guess it can notify you via your cell phone when a load is done. I could see that having value.
An 1830's egg timer already resolved this problem, Future Boy...
It would be neat if it would then hang it to dry and when dry fold it and put it in the closet. It doesn't so it isn't. Its is just an old school jingle alert with extra (datatracking, most likely) steps.
I know so many people that will tell me that that is important to them. Those same people will hear the little jingle on their washing machine know that it's done, and then not go move the laundry around for 3 hours
Yeah.
Growing up, the washer and dryer were in the basement and you could really only hear that if you were in the living room with the TV off (so... never). But as an adult (who is finally living somewhere with its own washer/dryer...), I can hear that jingle throughout the entire house if I am not watching a loud movie at the time.
Growing up, we would more or less time it. Start a load and set the alarm on your watch for when it is done. But basically any modern washer/dryer is going to use fuzzy logic based on load weight and water levels and humidity and so forth. You can approximate how long it takes, but you don't really have a proper timer. Which was annoying when my friends' washer broke and they had to do loads at my place and it was always "Can you text us when it actually finishes?" or "So... I see you play Warframe. A lot... Uhm... It says there is five more minutes left"
So yeah. I can definitely see value in a networked washer or dryer depending on your living situation. And, while it would break IMMEDIATELY, I would love a washer and dryer with SMS push notifications for apartment complexes.
Also, while it is immensely wasteful (or a great way to get mildewy clothes), there is something to being able to start a dryer load when I pass the gas station about 20 minutes from home on a snowboard day. Because that would mean that I would have time to get home, take a really quick shower, and put on toasty warm clothes to compensate for having spent a few hours bouncing in the snow. And I would allow SO much spyware to enable that...
Couldn't you just program it to start (and stop) at a given time, or make a note of how long it says on the display that it'll take?
It seems (to me) like a very, very minor improvement for a huge cost, namely that your washing machine is on your network and is internet connected.
And I bet you it reduces reliability, because all those fancy electronics are absolutely crucial for it to work at all and brittle as a sand castle. So you'll end up with a white brick if the wifi module craps out or a capacitor gets too warm.
Then again, a simple timer on your phone could do the same thing.
Modern machines don’t display accurate cycle times at all. They use sensors to detect when to finish.
Exactly, it's just an estimate.
Wait: Do the times listed on the screen of your washer/dryer actually reflect reality‽
My dryer will say it's got 20 minutes remaining for like an hour and a half. And yes, I clean the lint screen and vent regularly (all the way up to the roof!).
You don't really need an accurate timer. If it says 2:30, just set an alarm to 3h and you'll be fine most of the time.
My 30 year old, no electronics dryer takes consitent time.
Washers usually give better estimates than dryers. How long something takes to dry depends on the material used. The washer doesn't care about anything but weight.
Or even just knowing approximately how long the cycle goes for.
Mine plays a loud jingle when it's done, which seems to be enough for me.
Its enough for me too. But not everyone has the same use case and environment. I definitely see why someone would want this.
What I disagree with is that it needs to communicate to the internet to do this. It adds delay and potential for outage if your internet is out. But they do this so they can force you to get their app and milk you for extra data to sell. Internet capable smart devices are to harvest data not grant features. Features could be done better by ZigBee and a hub, but that doesnt grant the device a way to phone home
Mine is in my garage, and I can't hear the jingle from inside the house.
But two power monitoring smart plugs+ home assistant fixed that issue
A timer on your phone would have done the same with less hassle.
You underestimate the strength of my ADHD. Automation keeps me from having to rely on ol' unreliable
Most washing machines have sensors and do not dry based on a timer. The program time is just a rough estimate, if clothes are still wet or soap bubbles are still present it will do extra rinses or spins.
Correct. I often find myself going downstairs to the washing machine after 2 hours because it said 1:30h, and then it still needs another 12 minutes.
You could then just set the timer to 2:15h. Still much easier than setting up "smart" tech. It's like when a buddy of mine spent much money and put quite a bit of work into achieving that his smart light bulb lights up when he's nearing the apartment door whereas I just screw in a bulb with an integrated movement sensor that achieves exactly the same thing without pairing, sending out gigabytes of data from spying on me, and costing loads of money.
Setting a timer is more of a hassle than having my washing machine notify me when it's done - however is most convenient for me. Due to the layout of my home, I am unable to hear the washing machine directly. And setting a timer on my phone sounds like a pain in the ass. And sometimes my wife or kids started a load and I don't know when they did that, but I need to do some laundry myself, so I need to know if the washer is free but I don't want to go all the way to the basement to find out.
Luckily, my washer connects to my Wi-Fi and, unfortunately, to the Internet. I very much like that it will notify me on my smart devices around the house and on my phone. It's actually a great feature. Similarly, I can see my next oven notifying me when it's preheated. Similar reasons - might be doing laundry or out of earshot when it's ready to cook.
The problem here isn't the feature itself. It's undeniably useful. The issue is that LG's programmers somehow wrote code that resulted in a tremendous amount of web traffic considering the extremely limited data that could possibly be collected by a washing machine. Think about every tiny thing you did today and write it all down in great detail. You could probably write a short novel if you really tried. And all that can be written to a file less than 1MB in size. The washing machine did not, could not collect that amount of private information about you without also sending audio and/or video. And I'm going to go ahead and assume it has neither microphones or cameras.
So, in the end, this is pretty clearly a programming error. My guess: The washing machine sent a json file containing:
And, due to a programming error, it sent this exact same data every second, uncompressed, all day, every day, until the stupid thing gets updated with a firmware patch.
My point is, that's simply not useful data to collect at that sort of frequency. It's true - LG wants that data , but it absolutely does not want that data sent to their servers every millisecond of every day. They want it probably once per hour. Maybe even once every 5 minutes. LG doesn't want 4GB(!) of the exact same data. Collecting and storing data costs real money and infrastructure.
TLDRB I'm going to guess that someone screwed up on the coding side and that's how you get such egregious amounts of network traffic from a washing machine.
But the one I own does a great job of notifying me and doesn't show the same traffic patterns. So I still think those and features are useful. Eventually you'll probably be glad to have them in your appliances too. There's a ton of use cases for it and it's quickly becoming standard since the technology is incredibly cheap to produce.
Source: a programmer
That's really on a person by person basis. I'm a software engineer, and have already automated a lot of aspects of my life, so adding another device and a new automation took me like 10 minutes to setup.
Yup. There are two situations here:
If I'm at home and won't hear the sound for some reason, I'll just set an alarm on my phone. My washing machine tells me how long it'll take, so there's no guesswork here.
i have an old one without any of it and i dont even care, ill be there eventually and see its done.
im okay with my clothes waiting for a bit
Not trying to defend stupid internet connectivity but my washing machine is in the basement in a shared laundry room while I live on the second floor of the apartment building. No way I'll hear it beep so a notification would be very useful actually. This is a very common situation in Europe where a lot of people live in rental apartments.
The problem is rather that there needs to be WiFi access in the laundry room.
Is this washing machine yours? Or is it owned by the landlord? If it's the landlord's, that's a different problem entirely, since now you need multiple people to have separate configurations on the same device to get notifications, but only when their particular load is finished.
I can absolutely see a reason to have "smart" laundromats for things like error codes, abandoned loads, usage statistics, maintenance history, full coin reservoir, etc. That's the type of problem a shared laundry room would have as well, and it would be fairly easy to add a "tap to notify" feature where you scan a QR code or tap with NFC to get remote access to it.
But for a typical home situation where the laundry machine is the apartment or house, I really don't see a point, and it's just a liability.
It is mine. There is a room with each tenant' washing machine in the basement and that is a typical situation in Germany.
Huh, I've never heard of that before. Interesting.
Washing machines exist that are smarter than just running a fixed program. They adjust the program, and thus duration, based om how dirty the clothes are. The same goes for dryers that look at the actual humidity of the clothes to determine if they’re finished.
Hahaha, but why?
I've used the shortest cycle, on cold, for 30+ years, with less than half the detergent "recommended". Clothes are always clean.
And my clothes get dirty. Mechanic dirty (oils are tough). Welding. Tree sap from cutting down/splitting.
Front loader?
Sure, and if I'm off by a few minutes, that's totally fine. I honestly don't need to know the moment my clothes are done, it can wait 20-30 minutes usually. In general, a laundry run takes an hour, plus whatever soak time I choose.
So I really don't need any network access. I guess it's fine if others want it, but I see it as a liability. If it connects to a network, that's a security vulnerability (don't want a laundry DOS) and another thing to break. Ideally, every model could optionally ship without it.