AEG combi microwave unusable after update: device thinks it is a steam oven
tellerreport.com
tellerreport.com
Ah yes, it's to prevent people downgrading or running "unauthorized" firmware when they inevitably start adding user-hostile "features".
Just have support walk them through a menu on their phone for an "advanced" feature they just tap on, then hold the button on the microwave. Voila!
(Granted, I did tech support long enough to know this isn't easy; if someone can follow instructions, however, it should be doable.)
That last part could also be because I harp on it every time the topic comes up, that under no circumstances should she be answering yes or ok to any random prompts that she isn't very familiar with already, and please call me if she's at all questioning the legitimacy of what she sees.
My grandma is not tech savvy, but can follow directions pretty well. My spouse's grandma is tech savvy to a certain level and manages her own computer and photo library. I know either of them would likely be able to hold down a button and follow some set of directions to join a wifi and upload a file.
Now, figuring out how to get a containerization platform running in there might be a different matter...
I tease my wife about not figuring out email until 2005. Of course I date back to the era whence we had to run down to the data center and take turns on the operator console to send each other text messages.
It is a high end (costs 12x what I paid for my last microwave) with browning elements. If that is the device you cook with you are probably wanting more out a microwave than a single big red button that says “+30 seconds” on the front. Programming your defrost, cook, and browning cycle is probably nicer on an app.
- Pre heat oven remotely
- Check on the food remotely
- Have (and update) settings for specific food?
I mean it's not the worst thing to connect online.
My current owen actually forces me to at least open once the hatch before allowing it to be switched on (I guess that it's to force me to check if anything was previously left inside).
/sarcasm
[0]https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/...
About the only thing it's useful for is to remind me when its preheated.
I took out the power controller board, unsoldered the two resistors that burned and put on higher wattage rated resistors. The light sort-of works now: it makes several seconds to turn on, dunno why.
Probably the right fix would be to replace the board with a custom design with just a little transformer and a diode.
I’ve run into several microwave controllers with a similar misfeature. All used the same controller board despite being different makes and models. The part that controlled the light was a plug-in board on the controller and a short in the light socket could blow a diode on it. Bad design since burnt out incandescent bulbs often fail with a short. The plug-in replacement cost ~$8, but nobody seems to stock it, only The whole controller board at ~$175.
I hate to have to change the time of the oven twice a year. It annoys me :P
I have a nice, cheap, small alarm clock by my bed which gets the current time over air (some sort of radio signal, probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock ) => works great, in the past it maybe needed up to 30 minutes or so to do an initial update of its time after a change of batteries, but then it always worked perfectly.
Why aren't more appliances using that? Shouldn't even an oven, maybe having a small antenna embedded in its front, be able to get that signal?
Hot Pockets are aerodynamically designed to be delivered directly to the mouth for most destructive effect. Short (napalm like cheese), medium (gaseous effect), and long term (myocardial infarction) impacts are improved at higher ordinance deliver rates.
Seeing as most major appliances are stationary it would have struck me as a good fit (with the exception of time zones / DST).
I don't understand this constraint as it was possible to buy wristwatches that could do this back in the early 1990s and probably earlier (that was when I saw one for the first time).
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
This also goes for assuming good faith -- when companies reach a certain size, the mantra instead becomes "always assume bad faith."
Kinda like how paying devs to push firmware updates to a damn microwave costs a lot more money than making a microwave that just works and doesn't need OTA updates?
If my oven has enough of a computer to have a firmware that can be updated remotely, it is too dangerous to own.
EDIT for disbelievers: The software update meant for an oven successfully installed on a microwave, and bricked the microwave because it was writing instructions to the wrong addresses. Why believe the software would never accidentally write to the 'heating element relay' bit in an oven?
The WiFi functionality is also such total garbage that it'll only stay connected for a few days, and requires physically unplugging and re-plugging the power to the oven to get it to reconnect.
That it's possible at all suggests that the oven is only one bad firmware update away from turning itself on when you don't intend it.
Conceivably such a limitation could be built into the hardware; e.g. with a button that works like a circuit breaker. Set to break after the oven starts once and requiring the user to manually reset it. But the odds of it actually being implemented in this way, rather than pure software, is virtually nil.
Also, because of the crappy WiFi it's almost never connected anyway.
I'm not sure I'd be willing to believe a manufacturer on this. This feature is probably implemented in software, rather than hardware - simply because it's cheaper.
The idea of any of these home appliances being internet connected really blows my mind.
I worry that agile is largely responsible, and has mutated into a pipeline for garbage, though I don't have any evidence to confirm that suspicion.
I got involved in that movement before the word "Agile" existed; I was really interested in the ideas coming from the Extreme Programming folks and had tried them out on a small project in 2000. All of the people I met early on really wanted to do software well; the question was how to do it well and responsively. Unit and acceptance tests were just part of the process [1], and Kent Beck also wrote Test Driven Development By Example [2] around then. So in my view there was strong early interest in quality.
But this was all happening during the rise of the internet, which changed people's expectations for software delivery. Previously, releasing every 18 months was seen as reasonable. Suddenly the web was changing people's expectations. (Although not as fast as you'd think; a consultant pal told me in 2004 that Weight Watchers still had an annual release cycle for their website.) Executives and managers were under pressure to deliver faster.
As I wrote about elsewhere [3], that created a need for Agile that was filled not by the humanistic culture and quality-oriented practices of my end of the Agile world, but by consultants and certification programs watering down the material until executives could slap some new labels on their same old bullshit and call it Agile.
It turns out that bullshit long predates Agile. If you go back to Royce's original 1970 paper on Waterfall [4], one of his big points is that it doesn't work. Why, then, did it become the predominant way to organize software projects? Because it feels good to managers. For most of the project, it gives them a feeling of control and competence. That feeling is false, as it just delays all of the real-world feedback until near the nominal end. But they can perform confidence and competence to their boss, which is vital in managerialist [5] organizations.
So I totally agree with you that Agile on average has mutated into a garbage pipeline. And that happened through a whole industry that produced manager-friendly process theater that threw out a quality focus and most of the Agile values, while using the Agile labels. But I think the real responsibility lies in our management culture and values, which both precedes Agile and whose harm extends well beyond it.
[1] http://www.extremeprogramming.org/map/loops.html
[2] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/test-driven-development...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20170923232057/http://agilefocus...
[4] https://pragtob.wordpress.com/2012/03/02/why-waterfall-was-a...
[5] See, e.g., https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/confronting-managerialism-9781...
Waterfall is not just "feels good" - it decouples their evaluation from their performance.
Until the end, everything is good because there's no measurement to show otherwise. At the end, measurements that show things have gone wrong merely prove that some past manager failed.
The only way to fail is to be a manager throughout the whole project, and management rotations guarantee that that never happens.
It's not just software. The scheduled manager tenure at at least one of the largest semiconductor companies is one year shorter than the design->ship cycle.
And I'd add that at the end of the waterfall cycle, metrics often (and incorrectly) show that the workers failed. After all, they said they were 95% done just a bit ago, and now they're suddenly not done. It's very easy to shift blame to them.
As contrast, a lot of the effective Agile techniques don't actually fix problems; they just shorten the feedback loops so problems surface sooner. That's part of why fake Agile won out; managers didn't adopt any of the bits that would make them feel uncomfortable or expose the very real problems with how they run things.
For some reason, they are often better along many axes: cheaper, easier to clean, more customizable, more powerful, more flexible, etc.
I really like the professional induction stoves, with actual physical dials, no touch crap.
And the best part, there is a huge used market for professional appliances in really good shape, for even lower price.
My oven stops working with some nonsensical error message when I try to use it above 350F, so I'm in the market for a new one.
Any particular brands on the induction stoves? I may want to move on from gas someday.
Other than that though, and I have a lot of professional cooking experience, I wouldn't. They're generally uninsulated, made of just sheets of stainless steel. Touching them can burn you, they can have sharp edges and corners that can badly cut.
Their safety assumes frequent and thorough cleaning regimes. Where a residential system will have safer failure modes if not maintained correctly, a commercial one may just become a grease fire instead.
Also the dimensions and their dynamics just are often not good for the kinds of cooking you do at home. It takes an hour to heat a full-size uninsulated commercial stove's oven to baking temp. Commercial gear is generally built around that assumption: that you will turn it on once, every single day, and run it for 12-18 hours straight. That completely changes the design, efficiency, and maintenance constraints in ways that may not work at home.
I used to want a big two-basic stainless commercial sink with sprayer. I stayed in an airbnb with that once, and it turns out it takes several gallons of water to fill that even a few inches, a minimal amount to wash dishes. A restaurant's water line can do that in seconds, it can take minutes on a home one, depending.
There are definitely specific, individual pieces where the commercial versions are easily adapted to home use and superior. There are many more cases where they aren't. A blanket "buy commercial" is not good advice imo.
If anything, the consumer grade stuff tends to all be made roughly the same, and in many cases is just someone slapping their brand on an OEM appliance.
https://www.homedepot.com/b/Smart-Home-Smart-Kitchen-Smart-F...
I would be concerned that Alexa would turn on the faucet silently without me knowing, potentially causing a flood.
I think this is the key right here. They want to reduce the life expectancy of kitchen appliances to force people to buy new ones sooner.
"Can you show me only the non-smart appliances, please? Oh, you don't have any? Are you sure, can you ask the manager? Alright, I'm not interested in anything, have a nice day."
Sure, it doesn't mean very much on your own, but neither does voting - the value is in collective action. If everyone who specifically doesn't want a smart appliance, smart car, or smart TV makes a big deal about it, then manufacturers and retailers will start to notice.
Last time I went to buy a refrigerator, there maybe only one or two that were freed of the extra features that I did not want, compared to the 30 or so that were on display. And TVs without wifi were nonexistent.
Even if a regulatory solution is ideal (which I'm leaning toward), corrupt politicians will make it very difficult to get that regulation enacted, which means that "voting with your wallet" and making a big deal about it are both still necessary in the meantime, and will provide some benefit if done en-masse.
I recently bought a thirty year old home complete with its contents whose owner was an old man. The newest thing in it was an air conditioner from 2007. Know what? Every single thing is in perfect working order. AC, fridge, stereo, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, thermostat. The list goes on and on. Everything from electric can openers to garage door openers works like it was brand new. If Google can't match that standard it can get stuffed.
Many Texans discovered this the hard way.
Things like that is where I wish local-only home automation had become more prevalent. Imagine if your washer or dishwasher could send a "completion reminder" to your home assistant to push to you. No need for a dozen different apps and C&C servers, just a local MQTT or SNMP like message to the on-prem hub or listener.
This is a keeper.
If the grid is very slightly over 50hz it means demand exceeds supply and vice versa.
By automatically switching off the pump on thousands of fridges for a few seconds, networks would require less generation capacity on standby - saving $$$ and CO2.
Of course, like you say, this would leave potential for this to be used in reverse to destabilise an entire grid.
Not to be too pedantic, but it's actually the opposite. Frequency drops as demand goes up, which requires more supply to compensate. This is because the generators physically spin more slowly as they are put under more load.
Also occurs to me that it's 60hz in North America, but point roughly remains!
> It's a toaster, just like the one you already have on your counter, except it won't work unless you give the manufacturer a copy of your rolodex.
People then would laugh in your face, but today most people don't even seem to blink. The absurd has been normalized.
Specifically my laser printer has a thermal bypass switch, my smartphone(s) have charge controllers integrated into the batteries, my water heater has a pressure release valve, my oven is literally designed to withstand max heat for an indefinite period of time, my garage door is a death trap in four different ways (but has redundant safeguards for all of those), my kettle has has a thermocouple that trips when it boils dry etc. etc.
From a micro-morts perspective, adding “electricity” to an object makes it significantly more dangerous than adding “internet”. Ie going from a hand grinder to an electric grinder. But the utility is worth the trade off.
My threat model allows me to be completely cavalier with a dishwasher. I would be considerably more serious with safety concerns were I to put a chemo machine in my garage. My suspicion is that people who haven’t shipped home appliances connected to mains are not aware of how much of the engineering effort goes into making these machines safe relatively to how little it does for adjacent categories and are mis-indexing risk over bigger issues like vendor lock in as with the Sonos upgrade fiasco a few years back.
From what I recall your background was in industrial machines and I concede the point that if sent an inappropriate signal, disaster would ensue. I don’t connect my CNC machines to my network but I meant to scope this discussion to home goods which are meant to have a lot of protections built in - specifically against the “user” - which compared to “internet” or “electricity” will always trump unpredictableness :-)
- They don't support their own products; the warranty is served by a third-party
- Their products are built to a price-point, and fail just after the warranty is up
- Spare parts are expensive
- They apparently have neither an email address or phone number
The water heater in my AEG dishwasher failed three times in six months. Each time I had to wait a month for the repair man to arrive, declare that my water-heater had failed, and come back two weeks later to fit the part.
I don't understand why market forces haven't bankrupted them.
Whirlpool fridge had door isolation strip uneven resulting in some heat coming in, from Day 1. Induction stove had few flat touch buttons responding only to strong pressure, kind of randomly, also Day 1. Electrolux - dish washer is well below average in quality of cleaning, our 15 years old Bosch does much better job. Also Electrolux - stove hood, something broke inside after maybe a year, so it performs at maybe 20% of the basic speed. Faster modes don't work at all and it shutdowns itself after maybe 5 mins. This one is especially annoying since its built into the wall.
Fuck these trashy brands, I'll never ever buy anything else from them. Its Siemens, Bosch and Miele, but mainly Bosch which doesn't command Miele's high price and reliability/features are OK for us. I am not rich nor patient enough to waste so much time, money and energy on anything else.
From my experience, you can't go wrong with either of those - and, just in case you didn't know already, Siemens and Bosch are basically one - even operating under "BSH", Bosch/Siemens Home Appliances: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSH_Hausger%C3%A4te
That also means that each company basically has their own version of each product - i.e. the same fridge with slightly different features (different tray combinations/heights/...) are available from both (varying model # of course) - and one may be even a little cheaper than the other...
To my reasoning, more features means more things to fail, means less reliable. And I've always disliked feeping creaturitis - I always use the same settings on appliances. And I get to pay less if there are less features; so I win both ways. What's not to like?
Love has ruined my body,
Washing has ruined my hands.
I think the short answer is that companies spend many hundreds of billions each year manipulating the market. Instead of going to all the hard work of building a trusted brand, you can just buy one people have a vague familiarity with, spend a bunch on marketing, and ship cheap garbage until the brand value has been reduced to zero.
But why are they making machines out of parts they know are defective? Why are they not incentivised to fix the design? For example, a washing-machine electronic control panel with a defective circuit design, which meant that a certain diode was overloaded, and would reliably burn out a short while out of warranty.
Electronic control panels for white goods are incredibly expensive. Come to that, if you started from scratch to build (e.g.) a washing machine from manufacturer's parts, you'd have to sell your house. If the parts really cost that much, it's a wonder they can sell their own version so cheaply.
Oh, and in case it needed to be said -- I strongly, strongly recommend avoiding Samsung for appliances. They are awful. The part of Samsung that does monitors and smartphones seems pretty great, but their appliance division makes abysmal stuff.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30147379
And "GE won’t let me use convection roast on my new oven without connecting to WiFi" (Mar 5):
All????? They didn't roll out the release gradually? Holy hell.
Have you looked at dev wages for appliances? That explains everything in short. Everything has to be done for the cheapest price in the shortest amount of time. Fractions of cents are cut in every directions when possible. So when you're operating dev teams on shoe string budgets under constant crunch, there's no talent nor resources for sane management, dev and testing practices. Kind of like the game dev industry, but worse.
And the sad part is, there are really great devs stuck in that shitty industry, as it takes a lot of skill to write code so efficient it fits in undersized ROM or write firmware that can replace HW components.
Source: former embedded dev
It's different for e.g. cars where it's typically millions, at least for the computing parts.
I would say Siemens and Bosch are solid while still being affordable.
So if I _would_ trust these internet connected devices (which I do not, because of stories like this and other user hostile behavior), I'd really like to use the features that would make possible.
>The ovens can no longer connect to Wi-Fi due to the wrong software update, so a new update cannot be performed.
>The problem must therefore be solved on location, the spokesperson confirms.
You're maybe joking, but when I worked in automotive, they really worked hard to save 2mm in length of a thicker copper wiring inside the ECU to save maybe a cent. No joke.
Unless you're in the high margins league of Nvidia, Apple, etc, the rest of the HW industry is insanely price sensitive, so all these jokes on how cheap manufacturers are, are the reality on how the industry is staying afloat.
Manufacturers go with whatever marketing tells them will sell and what consumers are buying.
Personal anecdote time: I was part of a team developing a HW product a few years back and one day our boss comes in fumigating:
Boss: "RGB! Management wants us to put damn RGB LEDs in our up-coming products."
Us: "But why, what for? Do they know it has zero usage in our products?"
Boss: "Doesn't matter to them. Sales guys said our competitors have RGB now and customers will not buy our products anymore since they see that the competition has one extra feature we don't have, so we gotta put that RGB in ASAP somehow."
Us: "Ok, and what shall our firmware do with the new RGB LEDs?"
Boss: "Don't know <shrugs>. Marketing is still trying to figure that one out, so we'll code the firmware before the product launch."
I rest my case. This whole consumer industry is absolutely mental.
And so, today everything needs to be internet connected, because it's another feature on a spec sheet that marketing/sales demands.
While experimenting, the engineer, who was also a guitarist, found that it sounds really cool to play while you turn the knob.
The director wanted to sell these knobs to jazz orchestras and big bands for the trumpeters, but the engineer was like "Hold on a second, I think we can put this in a pedal and make it a guitar thing".
Hotpoint is part owned by Us company Whirlpool and Chinese company Haier.
Its my belief the fridge freezer firmware was updated using the mains cable much like thernet powerline adapters work. I still have the fridge freezer so will be tearing it down and inspecting the electrical components to prove this in good time.
As to why it needs security updates, it's because it's connected(able) to the internet.
https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00049148/
With AEG's app, you can find a recipe and the app will automatically set the temperature and cooking time for you.
The one appliance I have that has internet capability that I don't understand is my dishwasher. It has the ability to be remote started. I can't think of a single use case for this, since you need to load soap to use it, and it has a delay feature. It's a great dishwasher, and I bought it in spite of the silly internet option, which I've never enabled.
Presently have those lighting spark things on my 5 year old samsung. Already failures.
No, I do not want networking, apps, wifi, touchscreens or any form of digitality.
This shit is glitter for the "technologically educated" class. Turning a $1 tshirt into a $10 tshirt
Unfortunately, there were 4 knobs - so you wouldn't be interested.
- I could turn it off from my phone when I hear the timer, but don't feel like going to the kitchen to silence the oven alarm.
- I could view what's cooking inside without having to be at or open the oven.
They already exist. We're living in the future and/or a joke.
This and Russia turning the yellow arches sideways calling it Uncle Vanya make it feel like we've entered Los Santos.
It has double meaning in Russian because чаиник (chaynik) - Russian for teapot is also slang for a fool, a newbie, inexperienced, dumb.
Unfortunately I think for the average customer this is a "blue crystals" feature, something they don't really need and probably don't use much but that makes the device feel new and cool. Mass market product development is governed by what the bulk of the market does, so we will probably see more "put a chip in it" trash.
The solution is unfortunately to go up market and pay more for luxury or commercial grade stuff. On the plus side it tends to last a lot longer, so if you factor in life span it may cost about the same.
So around two or three years ago I replaced it with an ESP2866, a relay and an ds18b20.
It worked great, except that the logic was outside the fridge on a home server, it was a a Python script which also logged the data into InfluxDB. The issue then was that sometimes when the server was down, the fridge stayed on or off.
Last week I started to reorganize my WiFi, which devices access which APs, and since then it had constant disconnects, so I decided to finally fix this issue.
Now it's an ESP32 with the logic in code which now only posts to the server for InfluxDB-logging and is upgradeable via OTA and parameters can be set via http://fridge.home/esp?data={"set-fridge":{"max":7,"min":5.5...}
It's been fun doing this and extended the lifetime of the fridge for a couple of years.
But I also would never buy an internet connected fridge or any type of appliance, unless it could be flashed with some OSS to make it cloud-free.
For a heat pump or something that can actually make good use of the internet (remote control, looking at electricity prices, planning with weather information) the cost/benefit analysis is different.
I'd hate to have an internet connected microwave but I'd love to have an internet connected heat pump (Or ideally a heat pump with a local REST api so I can just tell it myself)
I still don't see the point of my fridge being connected to wifi, but I'll admit that I might just be a bit of a Luddite.
So their usability is as good as the software written to control them and the motor/sensor windings, etc.
Not unlike the software controlling that microwave.
No. There haven't been any production cars with steer-by-wire. (except Infiniti Q50, but it still kept mechanical steering column as fallback)
On my 2014 Prius, the brakes use an electric pump to power the hydraulics. In normal operation, the computer handles the brakes, but there is a physical backup.
The throttle is completely by wire, because there is no more reliable way to run two electric motors and a gas engine together with an analog system.
Drive by wire systems replaced a mechanical throttle linkage with an electronic control, and the reason for this is because it's massively better in every aspect, using EFI vs a throttle body. There are some hybrid designs called TBI (Throttle Body Injected), which are meh. EFI controls fuel and air mixtures dynamically using servos and relays driven by the ECU in response to signals from the drive by wire system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_steering#Electric_system...
I did not know there was still a mechanical link.
I still like the fact my car is full mechanical everything which seems to fail more "softly" than any replacement that relies on software. Toyota's electric accelerator and its spaghetti-code comes to mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_unintended_acceleration...