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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Surprised this isn’t a YC startup to be honest, what with all the open source companies in recent batches.

Give me Bosch, Speedqueen, etc appliance quality with right to repair and I will pay. I want dumb yet sturdy equipment that will last.

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There's an entire line of Whirlpool/Amana/Roper washers that all have 5-7 LED lights under the cycle selector knob and are top-loader washers. If you push the drum of these washers toward the cycle selector panel you can reach down on the left side and pull a service manual out that gives you instructions on how to access a troubleshooting menu in the control board, plus electronics schematics and strip circuits to simplify troubleshooting when parts go out. They're very simple and all use some combination of a main motor to agitate and spin, a drain motor, a "run capacitor" to smooth out power, and a shifter to change from agitate to spin, and a pressure transducer either in the water level selector or built in to the main PCB depending on whether it has auto-sense.

They're ridiculously easy to work on and you can buy parts for them off PartSelect.com. The most common issues are that a relay on the control board goes out or the suspension wears out. Both are easy to diagnose.

Thank you!

I noticed when I was delivering and installing appliances that many have a service manual tucked away somewhere with similar information. Ranges were typically taped on the back somewhere, I can't remember where the other appliances stashed them.

The delivery people or service techs from the appliance store sometimes steal these documents. Probably to make sure the owner has to call the store for service. When I opened my wife's washing machine to repair it the manual was missing and I had to find it online. It was brand new so someone from the store or warehouse probably stole the document.

Far down my todo list is to rehab an old washing machine I have sitting around that was said to have a "bad control board". Rather than buying another proprietary control board that always seem to somehow go "bad", my plan is to find or create a generic control board that handles driving the hardware and runs the state machine, and talks via serial to an ESP32 for local-control MQTT integration.

I feel like retrofitting older appliances might be the way forward, whether preemptively or as part of a repair. Although I do admit there are benefits to modern brushless drives (etc), that would be hard to design a generic control board for.

Although recently having gotten a tiny bit of experience with off the shelf PLCs, going that way might be the right answer rather than reinventing the wheel.

I lost the control board on a very simple electric stove, 4 pots for the stove top, 1 control for the oven, and a display with 2-3 LEDS and a display that showed either the time or the temp.

Looked very simple. Had a relay for the oven and 2 temp sensors. One for controlling the oven, and another to shut everything down if the temp outside the oven got too hot.

I do wonder how many types of these boards would be required to fit the common appliance types.

The oldest automated appliances were just complex mechanical timers sequencing various things on and off, and appliances haven't advanced that much. On/off motors, solenoids, sensors, and some series limit switches.

Probably the biggest new difference I've seen is brushless motors with variable frequency drives, which requires its own power control electronics and probably some calibrations.

So in my estimation not very many. Packaging it all up in a way that an appliance tech could be comfortable installing would be the hard part.

Is this something we engineers could create an online space for - eg 'repairWiki' - where we jailbreak appliance controls in an open-source kinda way? Would this run afoul of the law, or just Big Appliance?

Well, I'm not talking about "jailbreaking" (loading one's own software that perhaps may involve defeating treacherous computing measures), but rather wholesale replacement of the control board with a generic open one. That you're wondering if this might be illegal shows just how far manufacturers have succeeded in separating us from the idea of modifying things we own.

Documentation would be fantastic, but it feels like a curation/discovery problem. After a bunch of deep searching, you can usually find a forum where people are discussing various lines of machines at a higher level, what features they have, repairability, etc. Parts websites generally have diagrams and whatnot (no idea where these come from or what it takes to get access to it wholesale). You can usually figure out cross reference part numbers from pouring through eBay/Amazon listings. And sometimes you even stumble onto a wiki or something where someone has documented a specific machine tangential to another project (eg Home Assistant).

Gathering it all up in one place to be useful, especially in a way so people will contribute their findings back so it can be self-sustaining, seems like the hard problem to me.

That's not VC. That's just a regular business. Please start it.

This hypothetical product is not going to come from a YC startup...

Agreed!

Need more than that to disrupt a 100 year old home appliance industry.

I have Bosch and Siemens appliances and they are quite repairable? I fix some of the things myself and for some others I call a technician, and usually the fix is simple and involves replacing a moderate number of parts.

> Surprised this isn’t a YC startup to be honest

You have a lot more faith in YC than I do.

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