I'm a programmer and honestly I can't wait for this IoT fad to die down a little. Sure, maybe it's cool to have LAN connected lightbulbs as a novelty product. But this kind of shit will never ever be the norm, simply because it makes no damn sense in terms of value proposition.
- Being able to trigger dimming of the lights in the house as sunset approaches. - Being able close all the lights in the house in one go (such as when leaving). - dimming lights when I don’t have dimmers wired in. - being able to adjust colour temperature of the lights (and full colours, I tend to use a mix of oranges, pinks, and purples). - turning off lamps that are not otherwise on the same circuit as the ceiling when I flick a switch.
Things like dimming and controlling lights on the same circuit could be done with electrical work, but I’m renting. The bulbs come with me wherever I move. The electrical work doesn’t. I already was bringing my own lightbulbs wherever I moved anyways (to save electricity).
And guess what mr programmer, they didn't bother letting me do that with the front panel...
Why would you want your clothes to sit wet, collecting mold, before the drying begins?
See, part of being a good programmer is figuring out a solution using the tools you have. Which includes figuring out how existing machines address your issues without requesting they come with a fully programmable API and wi-fi, just so you can delay the drying cycle.
If I were to do this it would take 4 trips to the washing machine because they didn't think to make it tick over from even washing to drying.
Thinking you can dry your clothes better than the people who engineered the entire machine and wrote its programs is honestly cracking me up. Do you think the vendors were like "you know what, we don't need this washing machine to dry well".
Even more, what kind of a marketing campaign would such a scriptable machine even have?
"Our washing machine dries really poorly, but we hope every stay at home mom can script it to dry better, so we included a web server and a REST API with it".
They'll go bankrupt, man.
And thanks, I'll just spend this months rent on a new washing machine.
And yeah, uhmm... most washing machines can run drying after washing. You just took your specific model's issue, and decided to generalize it to "must be scriptable". Which is really a giant leap to make. To recap:
1. Your specific model can't dry after washing.
2. Your specific model can't be scripted either.
3. Other models can dry after washing.
4. Other models have no scripting.
Ergo whatever you do, you're buying a new washing machine. And your problem doesn't require scripting.
I'm a professional programming language implementer why can't I use those skills to do as I please?
Wrt to your previous comment, of course I'm talking about my model of washing machine.
I genuinely cannot fathom how it's hard to work out that my point is that if they'd stuck even the most basic interface on the back, which I bet the higher end ones already have for debugging just not exposed, I could make the machine do what I want. That's not the way the world is, but it would be better if it was.
Luckily for you I'm able bodied by the way...
If you're an expert, then you can hack with the debug interface, many enthusiasts do things like that with their devices.
And if you're not an expert, you don't want, you can't, and you'd never need to script your washing machine.
Edit: oh no apparently it's a questionably maintained communal laundry room unit, I'm so sorry
What would you want to script?
Also, of course, there's the "internal scheduling" of various different activities that the machine is doing; you can do that mechanically but IMHO it's simpler now to do that with a cheap microcontroller.
An ESP-32 is about 2 quid last time I checked, I have many, and I would happily attach it to the machine if not for the fact that it doesn't belong to me.
Also, the thing that's more annoying is actually that the machine's alarm is extremely quiet and the timer very inconsistent (e.g. I made a Pizza oven that sends me an email, and it wasn't hard to do at all).
wait what do you mean I still need to physically walk to the washing machine to load it this is bullshit
The only use case I can see is a notification when the cycle is done, but I think there are better ways to go about that than using an SoC.
Any more understanding than that would be sub-optimal for shipping consumer products where cost optimisation is a primary concern as the salaries for more competent engineers would cost the company more.
You can see this effect in action with the explosion of “smart home” devices after commoditised internals were made available by the likes of Tuya. Suddenly your company only needed junior engineers who could skin the whitebox turn-key solutions and product designers who could design a moulded plastic enclosure around a standard set of postage stamp sized circuit boards.
Great.
There is no incentive to be any better than that. When the average washing machine lives long enough that the majority of consumers will come back to their next purchase without feeling annoyed about software related issues. Extra frills that pushed them over the line into purchasing a particular model didn't quite work out how they hoped, the iPhone app didn't get updates and looks bad on their new phone, etc ... these things wont factor into their next purchase. It's a psychological time horizon thing, enough water passes under the bridge and the customer stopped caring long enough ago.
So as long as it was otherwise a solid washing machine that didn't have mechanical issues mechanically or wash poorly they aren't likely to hold the manufacturer to account for their poor software quality breaking the "nice to haves".