Companies are buying washing machines to take the chips out and repurpose them
protocol.com
protocol.com
It's about 20 years old. Your appliances have been more sophisticated than you think for longer than you think.
It is surprising, of course, that someone would rip up a new washing machine for parts, but not shocking. I imagine it would have to be very specifically for low-volume, high margin industrial equipment, which the article hints at but does not make explicit.
There's a Youtube channel named Technology Connections and he has several videos on this topic that I recommend. This one about Sunbeam toasters from 50+ years ago is particularly great:
Back when Electrolux was a reputable brand.
Has anyone ever looked at washing machine PCB's?
They're conformally coated with silicone. The whole control board with "the brains" is dipped into goo to protect it from the harsh, wet environment of a washer. The effect is that it makes component-level repair, let alone part-harvesting, intractable.
I think only the more upscale or expensive ones are coated for longevity.
Whirlpool is a major US brand of appliances.
This forum thread [1] show the exact PCB that burned out in my machine, I've bought the replacement on ebay back then. There was some motorola µc on it and several run of the mill components, but no adhesive or "goo".
[1]: https://elektrotanya.com/content/elin-wm-25e-q2-keresese#
Sometimes when all your solutions are bad, you just have to pick the least bad solution. It's still not a good solution, but not solving it is worse. If it is the only available device they know of with the chip they need, they might not have another option.
I hope this crisis moves industry just an inch towards better “right to fix”. Engineering decisions that make for the serviceable products will help reusability as well
Why would you think that? There are plenty of little generic microcontrollers kicking around in those machines.
So, the rumor certainly isn't true for any mass consumer products, though perhaps if you're making zillion-dollar specialty equipment where each sale is high-touch, you can have the customer acknowledge in writing that the device is being sold as "used", and perhaps even guarantee a replacement for the used part within some amount of time. Of course, if a company wants to use cannibalized washer parts for some internal purpose, that's just fine.
And how do you define "used"? If a module with a chip has been placed in a test harness, is it now used?
> and perhaps even guarantee a replacement for the used part within some amount of time.
It's called a warranty.
And, no, I'm not speaking of a "warranty." A warranty means "we'll fix it if anything breaks over a certain time period, perhaps with a refurbished part". That's different than "we'll replace this particular part with a new one as soon as we can, even if it's still working, to make sure you get the entire expected MTBF (as that's typically much longer than the overall warranty for the whole device)"
It's also wrong to think of used chips being as good as new. Yes, you avoid "infant mortality" (though that seems to be less of an issue than it used to be), but how do you know what environment the washing machine was run in? Thermal and power shocks decrease the lifespan, never mind humidity and static electricity. And even if the environment had been perfect, what about electromigration?
That's exactly the reason you can't put used parts into a device sold as new. If you still disagree with this regulation, you're best advised to take it up with the FTC rather than blithely choose to ignore it.
That simply doesn’t track with reality. If I return a good to Target, unopened, it is being put back on the shelf with no indication that it was ever sold previously.
Do you have a source to back up this claim?
Note that its trivial to work around. I purchased a bluetooth earpiece on Monday on amazon and its trivial to control-F around looking for the word "new". You will NOT find that word on any marketing. I don't believe any part of it is reused or recycled, however they're not dumb enough to use the word "new" in writing anywhere.
So I looked it up and it’s not really universally relevant. This is why people ask for citations…
That looked like a genuine request to me. Besides, some things really are questionable at a surface glance, but generally useful if and only if we know for sure they are factually true and the words used are precisely correct.
Maybe there's some fine print somewhere that describes the part as 'remanufactured', but when you ask for a new, say, brake caliper, that's what you'll usually get.
Customer doesn't care: they just want their boards delivered.
i.e. as a hobbyist you can’t compete with a large manufacturer w.r.t. large orders that get low per unit costs, but you can repurpose old parts cheaper (for your metric for cost) than they can.
There are some assemblers in China that are doing this too, but pricing is prohibitive for most cases. For instance, a chip that cost $9 before the crisis now costs >$100 + assembly. A toy with the same chip you can get for $5-$15 depending on volume, then it is 10 minute labour to remove the chip, clean it and put it on the target PCB (I do not include the final cleaning time).
My first employer (early 90's) would buy large lots of "pulls" for a fraction of the price that Arrow, Future or Digi-Key charged for new components. I'm guessing those sources are still available, just not as widely publicized these days.
It would be an interesting way to drive a final stake into the heart of brick and mortar retail; if everything is shipped FROM China for nearly free but shipping TO China costs $25/pound then very rapidly the only way to buy anything will be AliExpress.
Remember, "take back" doesn't mean much. Accepts postal delivery? We already have infrastructure for that.
Hoover actually had a model with programmable cycles (you put your custom cycle on Android and upload it via an NFC tag on the washer). What you could set was very limited, but they tried, I guess.
They may be buying something but it's not washing machines.
There are 1-5 logic chips, 1-3 firmware/storage chips and 5-15 transistors for inverter motors in a washer. That's it.
I'm not sure why more-modular electronics are not more of a thing.
For example, blue-pill STM boards are very cheap, because they are produced in millions. Similarly for many other modules.
How is it cheaper to design and produce a relatively limited run of integrated, custom washing machine control electronics, instead of a simple 'baseboard' and a bunch of really-really-mass-produced modules?
The later modular design would be a boon for legibility, repairability, re-usability, supply-chain resilience, etc, etc.
Of course, a repair involves replacing the entire proprietary electronics assembly (multiple PCBs, and plastic frame), and is just not economical, so the entire machine, valves, motor, steel drum and cabinet, are written-off because a mosfet failed, or whatever.
If the electronics were standardized and modular, even if encased in silicone, there would be an economic case to replace just failed modules.
Those are useless for practical application.
64 KB of flash and 20 KB of RAM on a stereotypical STM32F103 (edited to add weasel words: that's what a blue pill is, correct? I don't actually use them.)
Remember these are not PCs where you slap in a bigger SSD or another stick of DRAM.
I have a F767 dev board on my desk. Kind of the same family, 'F' series anyway, and it has 2M flash and I believe 768K of SRAM.
My latest simple application build (built while posting this) ended up 228744 bytes of flash and 142119 of sram.
What kills modern microcontroller storage is every thread has its own fixed size stack so 1K there, 16K there, pretty soon you've got a lot of RAM in use if you go thread-happy, and on the flash side like every civilized embedded device it has MCUboot so 2M sounds like a lot until you partition it into two bootable partitions for OTA upgrades and MCUboot itself takes 64K or 128K or whatever, and there's a big fat (not FAT32 lol) partition for non-volatile config storage. It doesn't matter what RTOS you're using they all seem to be about the same size in the end, FreeRTOS, Mbed, or Zephyr.
Another point worth making is peripherals, I'm pretty sure the F103 doesn't even HAVE the capability to connect ethernet whereas I'm doing OTA upgrades using wired ethernet using the F767.
Note that for decades now, I guess, its been possible to build a washing machine or a lithography machine as an arduino shield or raspi shield, but nobody does that. The part that would not be a boon would be FCC certification, UL certification, and whatever other safety certifications a product requires.
With respect to washing machines as a homeowner I have had to do some repair work on multiple dishwashers and value engineering is the rule, if it corrodes out in five years needing replacement from the point of view of the mfgr that's a "feature" not a bug. So I've never seen a conformally coated washing machine PCB although I'm sure they exist if you don't buy big-box store garbage. Let me remember... Some piece of trash from Sears from 15 years ago used to ship with mosfets having too small of a heatsink and a voltage rating about 5 volts higher than line voltage and an underpowered pump so the user was encouraged to use the water heating mode in operation to keep the water as hot as possible for the anemic pump resulting in the mosfet blowing out every year or so, replaced the PCB under guarantee about three times and tossed that POS. Got a Bosch from horrible depot and that one has a pump that somehow is anemic AND sounds like a screaming jet engine bearing after a year of use, on the third pump now and just ignore the incredible noise. I'm told for eco reasons the new greenwashing dishwashers use 10% less water but don't work at all so you have to run them three times to clean the dishes resulting in 3x the wear and tear (good for mfgrs) and roughly 170% increase in environmental damage over a non-greenwashing dishwasher.
Connectors also cost money; often more than you'd think. And they add additional points of failure.
Modularity also creates a compatibility matrix you have to track if you're a responsible OEM. I.e. can I use [X,Y,Z] sensor with [Q,R,S] base board and [A,B,C] MCU module and firmware [1,2,3]? In a model that may have shipped with motors [T,U,V]? That's 3^5 combinations right there. Compare that to, say, a single-digit or small two-digit number of actual combinations a manufacturer might ship as revisions over the life cycle of a design. You never have to worry about whether the Q base board will work with the C module in an integrated design.
That $2 blue-pill STM board starts looking expensive really quick compared to the cost of the microcontroller (and maybe the crystals if you really need them) at even modest volumes. It just doesn't cost that much to add a chip or other subcircuit to a PCB design for a real product.
But the true cost, to the environment, savings due to repairing more modular machines, vs scrapping and manufacturing, shipping, installing, etc whole new machines every few years, could be way less.
It's essentially never the microcontroller that fails in something like this, anyway, so you would never repair something by swapping out something like a blue pill dev board. Maybe you would swap in a microcontroller with a different pinout in production that way, to solve a shortage issue, but the development time and costs would be almost identical to just spinning the board. I really don't understand what problem you're trying to solve.
Modularity costs, in a number of ways, and one of them is the material involved. That material will ship in every unit whether it is ever needed or not. When your more modular devices are beyond repair or obsolete or just unwanted all of that material will wind up in the landfill.
A simple example is my washing machine that recently died. A mosfet blew on the motor inverter/controller, and obviously took out some other components too. It's silicone-encased, making it infeasible to diagnose and fix compoonent by component. The entire electronics, including psu, mcu, display, buttons, and motor controller are a single unit, and has to be replaced. Since it's specific to the model, it is rare and expensive, and not economical to replace, so the entire machine is now junk, or at best spare parts.
In my fantasy ideal, the motor controller would be a separate board, and fairly standardized to the motor size/design, just like stepper driver boards. The display/ui would be a separate board, since that is a common point of failure. The psu should certainly be a standard board. And the the main control board running the valves etc would again be it's own board. Interfaces and protocols between boards should be standard or at least documented.
Yes, multiple, simpler mcu's. And slightly more material, etc, as you say, though for a washing machine, the added weight of a few electronics hardly matters. But much less custom design, inventory, much more repairable, reusable, upgradeable, hackable, etc.
The washing-machine of Theseus, as it were.
Another example is a toaster oven that recently broke. One of the elements shorted or burned out, it is one of a handful of standard sizes/resistances etc, rather than some custom proprietary design. Nice and modular, just as I want. BUT, the elements are riveted to the rest of the oven, rather than screwed, making a replacement significantly harder, to the point I haven't yet bothered (eg I don't have a metal drill-bit), and I bought a replacement oven (with screwed elements - the search was not trivial). A saving of a couple of cents (riveting vs screwing) for the manufacturer has actually cost me, and the world, much much more. IMHO the repairability of this stuff should be mandated, or at least documented right on the front alongside the energy-efficiency ratings and purchase price, etc.
Those "maker" boards are dirt cheap because (a) the builders can use gray-market parts, including "pulls" (b) there is nothing on the board that isn't absolutely necessary: even the PCB itself tends to be 0.031" FR4 instead of the more robust 0.062" to save money. I've seen some boards in the Arduino ecosystem that clearly used punched holes to save money over drilling.
When you're building tens or hundreds of thousands of something, using a baseboard and daughterboard architecture is going to be far more expensive than putting everything on one board. Hell, I'd go so far to say that if you're building more than 500/year it's not worth it.
And the whole quote in context:
Peter Wennink
Well, I'm with the company 23 years, and I've always tried to read the minds of the investors, and I always got it wrong. So don't ask me that question. So, no, it's a place that can only read the minds, not only read the minds, but talk with our customers and see where we are today.
And the issue is, and I tried to mention this before is that, the demand that we're currently seeing comes from so many places in the industry. Technology-wise, market-wise, geography-wise, it's so widespread that we have significantly underestimated, let's say, the width of the demand. And I think that I don't think is going to go away.
And it just -- it's an anecdote, but I met a very large -- the executive of very large industrial company, a conglomerate, last week. And actually, they told me that they're buying washing machines to rip out the semiconductors to put them in industrial modules. I mean, that's happening these days.
Now, you could say, that’s an anecdote. But, to be honest, it happens everywhere. It is -- like I said, it is 15, 20, 25-year old semiconductor technology that is now being used everywhere. It's got -- it's all driven by IoT type applications.
I have drawers full of that crap.
>Anyone who has tried to buy a car or home appliance lately knows the chip shortage is still pretty bad.
Are people building some cheap washing machines without chips in them? That might be harder for cars to get away with, but come on, washing machines?
The people who can build mechanical clocks are either working on other things or making high-end wristwatches. There are still people inventing new watch movements.
Looking to legislate parts availability for ca 5 years is a step, but IMHO it isn't nearly enough for the long run.
Its actually just as bad as cars.
Fit for purpose is no longer a requirement for sales, but uses less water or uses less electricity is a requirement for sales.
> that large industrial companies are buying washing machines in order to rip out the chips and repurpose them, according to ASML CEO Peter Wennink.
=^/