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Comment by pygy_ | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't there be a market for 3rd party PCB and control panel kits for used machines?

Low volume market, having to sit on inventory for a long time and high upfront cost ? Sounds like a recipe for cheaper to buy new than repairing.

Interestingly enough, as soon as the price of replacing it goes up (because you have less to spend), and an abundance of second hand devices entering your country, this model of repair suddenly becomes feasible. In some African countries you can get your TV fixed if a certain part fails, because the local repairman takes all working boards from broken TV sets and keeps an inventory. It's a business model that is unsustainable in more 'developed' countries. Here repairs are only done on really high-end devices.

Beside that, there is the convenience factor. I can buy a new washing machine, and have it here tomorrow, where they take the old one away, and plug the new one in if I want to buy that option.

You can't get that level service from a repairman. They can't compete with this business model. And even if they could, the chance of them being able to fix it is not 100%, whereas the new one is all but guaranteed to work (for as long as that lasts).

It’s not unsustainable in Ohio. I bought my washer from a guy with a basement full of washers who was obviously repairing with parts from other machines.

Then we posted our broken washer for free and somebody came and took it. It was obviously going to be repaired and resold or used for parts.

>"with a basement full of washers who was obviously repairing with parts from other machines."

I really hope he has some sort of lift or elevator installed. His back is going to be destroyed in a few short years.

May be too late. He made it clear that he had a bad back and it would be my responsibility to bring somebody to help me get it up the stairs.

Yeah, I've received quotes for replacing the control board on a Whirlpool double oven that basically equalled getting a new (10 years newer) oven.

That's just for the part. I was willing and able to do the labor - would have been a fifteen minute job.

I mean eBay is full of sellers that deal in salvaged stuff. There are even sellers who offer rechargeable lipo batteries salvaged out of single use “disposable” vape pens.

If there is a market for something, no matter how small, somebody on eBay is catering to it.

You would think with proper diagrams you could replace the electronics with a raspberry pi

I'd guess it's power FETs that fail. You'd have to design a shield of sorts, manufacture it, and still bury it in a compound with the pi, since high-temp high-humidity environment will kill them in weeks. Of course, being buried in a brick of epoxy, both switching and the pi would have all sorts of cooling problems.

It can be done, but it's not that simple.

It’s funny how people will happily throw themselves into a hopelessly ambitious open source project but turn down a super impactful project that is relatively simple like this one.

And either be looking for a new side project, or hope that someone out there felt like putting their time into writing open source washer firmware.

RPi + an 8-10 channel relay board + some custom firmware?

I just had visions of explaining to my spouse that I need to debug the software on the washing machine… I don’t think that would fly.

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