Displaying my washing machine's remaining time with curl, jq, and pizauth | Hacker News Reader

Displaying my washing machine's remaining time with curl, jq, and pizauth

tratt.net

92 pointstodsacerdoti59 comments

> A couple of months ago our washing machine produced a considerable quantity of smoke when I opened its door, which I interpreted as a suggestion that a replacement was needed.

I just want to point out that what was actually needed was a repair. We're all so conditioned to think broken things must be replaced, it's easy to forget you should at least consider a repair first.

Again it depends. If it is real old machine repair probably isn't cost effective and even if the cost wasn't much, how long until next part breaks?

Plus you probably get new features out of your newer machine.

Of course if your washer is only couple years old repairing is the way to go.

In case one has full time job, the time and money to disassemble, investigate, diagnose, order parts and fix an appliance is comparable with simply purchasing a new one. Make them take away the old one and blame the environmental disaster on plastic straws and cutlery. Producers will dismiss any requests with "hire an authorized technician co come over onsite" so fixing will also increase your adrenaline level. Luckily you found some blueprints on the internet! oh bummer... they're in Cyrilic and French...

Today they’ll be in Chinese. In China, you might actually have a chance of cost effective repair, except the units they generally sell there are so cheap that replace is still more economical.

Third party appliance repair people/services do exist

In most locations I lived in these repair places ranged from "they are the same clueless as me" to pure scam. One week and 60 EUR to learn what's wrong with this thing? By then I'll be using a new one and will not have to take half day off.

Speaking as someone with a full time job, my solution is to call a local appliance repair outfit and have them send someone over to take a look.

30+ years ago my parents washing machine broke, my dad got his hands on a replacement control module thingy which was an electro mechanical cylinder that had the selection knob on the outside. The inside had 30+ wires (memory may be exaggerating) and he tasked me with labeling them, removing the push fit connectors and connecting them to the new controller. I don't think my 13 year old self ever felt such pressure but it was a great sense of achievement when it worked.

Very generally on a washing machine the first thing to go will be the carbon brushes/bushes - these are usually relatively easy (and cheap) to replace.

If it isn't the brushes then it is likely the control module - this is often so expensive to source new (and can be pricey 2nd hand) that there isn't much point in replacing.

My dishwasher needed a new board, and despite only being 5 years old, the manufacturer wanted 80% of the cost of a new machine. Even on the grey market I couldn't find a good price, and going 2nd hand didn't turn up the parts I needed. Was very sad to scrap such a new piece of hardware.

I feel like pricing like that is one big thing that needs to be regulated in any right to repair bill, price of parts is a huge barrier

Regulating prices produces situations that are rife with unintended consequences. Choose a different brand instead (unless that brand has a monopoly, which is only the case in a few industries.)

Many companies in the US are monopolies, aren't a ton of companies owned by the same 6 parent companies

Wow, this is the most convoluted and overengineered way I've seen of setting a timer.

It even involves a third-party server and email registration.

Bravo!

I am plotting a worse one. I have plenty of old phones sitting around, and the laundry in my apartment building has machines with weirdly inconsistent timing. I want to write a small mobile app that will transmit accelerometer data to my home Prometheus/Grafana setup so that I can put the phone on top of the machine and monitor for the end of the cycle.

Maybe ir would be simpler to get one of those smart energy monitoring plugs and plug the machine in there. When it is done power use should drop significantly.

Excellent idea. It should be possible to configure something like Home Assistant to send a notification when the power usage goes up, and then down. This should also work for the dryer.

I'm not sure if there's smart plugs that reliably/safely work with dryers (edit: electric dryers, that is)

My Aqara smart plug says it can handle 2300 W, which should be okay for the kind of dryers sold in Europe (apparently the new ones are mostly sub 1000 W).

In the US electric dryers run on 240v which has a different plug. Not sure how they are in the EU but it's something to consider when looking for one of those plug monitors

That’s easy, the whole Europe is 230 V at 50 Hz and basically the same plug (except I think Switzerland and the UK).

I'm in AU, certified smart plugs are 240V/10A. Dryers don't need a special outlet.

I had a configuration exactly like this via HomeAssistant. Set the trigger when the power output spiked above X and sent a notification when it eventually dipped back below X for Y amount of time.

Unfortunately I could not find a plug suitable for the dryer, but for the washer it was great. I eventually decided to decommission the majority of my smart home accessories and HomeAssistant entirely.

It's not my washer and dryer or my electrical outlet.

IMO anything that needs a signup to a web service that you don't control is worse.

Personally, I'd use an esp8266 or esp32 for that.

I'd also try to find a better way of sensing whether it's running/finished, by connecting directly to the power led (you can also siphon power to run the microcontroller from the washing machine itself), or measure power usage at the plug.

It being the apartment building's laundry machines, I think my landlord would have something to say about me opening them up and connecting to the LEDs.

Load sensors in modern washers (and moisture sensors in modern dryers) mean that the timer is an estimate.

But still, a timer with a reasonable buffer on it is fine. Just less nerdy.

i'm jealous that their washing machine has an API. I just used a 15A rated smart switch that has an espressif chip under the hood and flashed it so it tells me when the washing machine stops pulling current - that means it's done!

Your solution seems way more palatable to me. I refuse to use these third-party centralized services or hook up my appliances to the internet. Right now I just set an alarm on my phones for when I estimate it will be done, and snooze it a couple times to be safe (and lazy).

This is absolutely the way to do it for washers and non-electric dryers.

I configured my automation to notify me when both the washer and dryer are idle.

Personally I just use siri on my watch to set a timer.

I stick my head in the laundry room door and look/listen if the machine is still running.

lol I can tell it's running from all corners of the house and the loud ass buzzer when it ends is a great clue that it's stopped.

The laziest tech equivalence I can think of would be buying a baby monitor and mounting it in the laundry room.

I never know how long my washer of dryer is going to take. An event-based alert system seems way more reliable and convenient to me.

I just overshoot it a bit so I'm always there when it's done, an extra 20 minutes won't hurt.

This is a much better idea, if you ask me. It also automatically adjusts for variable length runs of the washer or dryer. Very clever.

I just installed the smart things app.

What brand of switch are you using

Did they display it again or something? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35536202

Side note and nothing to do with that. But does anyone knows why some washing machines timer are way way out ? meaning 1 minute washing machine is equivalent to 1:30mn real time ?

Okay nevermind: I should have google in english first :p

`Washing machine timers are sometimes in conflict with high-efficiency features like load sensing, which attempts to gauge the size of the load and only use as much water as needed to finish the cycle. That measurement may ultimately affect how much time the cycle needs, making the timer overly optimistic. ` https://reviewed.usatoday.com/laundry/features/why-the-timer... https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/646586/why-washing-machi....

Yeah the same is even more true of modern dryers, which have moisture sensors.

Designers of a device with a glass door that needs manual loading and unloading, and that in the event of an error alerts someone nearby for manual intervention:

> Instead of some buttons or dials on the front that people know how to use, an LED display (or dial), even a timer function the LED/dial could show, why don't we connect it to the internet and provide an API?

We have a Miele washing machine. Among its features is a readout that shows cycle, step in cycle, and time remaining in cycle. Do the new ones lack this feature?

Answering a slightly different question than the one you’re explicitly asking: I think then utility of this setup is being notified while you’re away from your machine.

I often leave clothes in the wash for 24 hours (or longer), and then they get all gross and I have to wash them again; this happens because I can’t hear the chime from my office, and with the way my brain works, I won’t think about it again until much later. I could set an alarm on my phone every time, but… that would require that I remember to do that.

I would love a way to either send a push notification to my phone, or have an audible house-wide chime, or something along those lines :)

Tie this into ntfy.sh and you've got the phone notification.

The simple solution is just setting a timer on your phone for whatever time the washing machine says it needs when starting it.

No, they display that nicely, and their mobile app pushes cycle finished alerts to phones pretty reliably. We never use the buzzer on our washer or dryer

If you are a Luddite like me, an old-school Speed Queen (yeah, same brand as in the laundromat) with mechanical switches will almost never break.

I think you should connect all your kitchen if you can xD

Friends don’t let friends program in bash.

Best done solo, in the dark, and never spoken of, eh?

Fair point.

> To get started, I first had to register my washing machine to my email address with Miele's app.

Yeah, Nah.

Central registration by apps on NAS appliances, IoT devices, etc. makes for a great one stop shop for the evil hacker ransomware gangs looking for precious data to steal | encrypt or (in these cases) needle holes that can be potentially threaded to gain network or social access.

Even if it's a simple case of email us to recieve a custom key to access your machine (no other network access required) it's still opening the door to marketing mail and potential phishing vectors.

For all that I love having access to mains water logging, power stats, irrigation timing, pump and tank stats etc. on a local secure LAN .. washing machines can fit in there for the notifications and tie in to task specific water use breakdowns.

The other side of the coin is that IoT stuff that accepts anyone's connection from anywhere is vulnerable to hack attacks.

Sure, you could secure it with a FIDO2 key or PKI or something, if you made it so that the crypto didn't rely on PII/contact info.

But you see, this is consumer equipment. Nobody will purchase FIDO keys or buy in to PKI, with all the joys of manual certificate management. Nobody in the IoT field wants to support that stuff even if hobbyists were into it.

The laundry room here is managed by a very large service company. They previously had web pages where anyone on the Internet could watch washers and dryers count down until they were finished. It was simple, it didn't use Flash, it worked for me from any device.

Then they "upgraded" and ruined everything. The laundry room is now full of Bluetooth signals, QR codes, mobile app posters, funny money that you reload into the app to pay for your laundry. It's a nightmare. Thank God they still accept coins.

But laundry rooms are high-profile targets for vandalism, abuse, inept usage, and all sorts of opportunities for breakage. I welcome central registration. A stable email address is the least I can do if it means that the machines can be serviced, and there is recourse for vandals and thieves.

At first I'm like "yeah sure, let me do the laundry in the laundry room", but then they're like "we'll need your phone number and email, please accept the terms and conditions, the deposit for card/token/key is 20 EUR, minimum recharge amount is 40 EUR, please enable Bluetooth (no, we're serious you have to enable Bluetooth), happy laundrying!"

I wrote a CSV parsing script in bash recently. Boy was that a mistake. It works, though.

I have one too. Although it loads it into SQLite, so I’m kind of cheating. :)

Why? I use bash when I think that Python is overkill, and I actually like it. I spend half of my workday in a CLI anyways.

Says every js hipster who will forever lack the power of shell ;)

Sysadmin here, with vehement hate for JS: Just use fucking Python, hell even fucking Perl, bash is a disease of the mind; every time I try to debug some complex legacy bash script I start thinking JS might not be so bad of a language and no language should make you think that.

I do use python, when bash doesn't make sense. Perhaps in this case dealing with API's Python was the better choice...but, the parent comment just blanket bashed Bash, and so did you. ;)

I have no issue with bash, it's simple to use even for complex scripts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com