I had sort of the opposite situation. I needed a new washer and all the top rated ones according to Consumer Reports included WiFi. I asked at Home Depot if the one I was thinking of getting, an LG WM3400CW, required me to actually use the WiFi and they said no.
I used it for a few weeks without ever even trying to set up WiFi and everything was fine.
Then I found at that when you set up an LG washer for WiFi you can get reports in the app of water and energy use. I'd actually like that, so decided to give it WiFi access.
I then found out that the WM3400CW does in fact not have WiFi. I think it might be the only current LG washing machine that does not have WiFi.
I suspect that Consumer Reports got confused because it does have LG's "Smart Diagnosis" feature, which gives you diagnostic reports in the LG app.
The way "Smart Diagnosis" in the app works with the WM3400CW is that the washing machine sends the data to the app acoustically. Press the button sequence to start a diagnosis on the washing machine and it sounds very similar to an old analog modem. The app listens to that with your phone's microphone.
Wouldn't it be great if a universal standard existed for devices sending their diagnosis via audio?
If there is a microcontroller and a beeper in there anyway, at only the extra cost of internal memory? Instead of a modem-type modulation and a speaker, make use of the bare minimum piezo beepers and send something that is universally understood? All of that without FCC, no extra hardware cost, no backchannel und thus little security considerations?
Yea - I know. Works much better to upsell "wifi enabled" and I'm happy that the appliances only beep rarely.
That reminds me of another thing I wish was a universal standard for major appliances.
I’d like to see them all have a USB port. If you plug in a thumb drive the appliance should create a directory named with the appliance manufacturer and model and serial number. In that directory it should place a copy of its manual and other documents that normally come with it.
...or just have device side usb port that shows up as a mass storage device?
That would be pretty inconvenient for appliances in places that are hard to reach with a computer, but definitely an improvement over the status quo.
An appliance could just have blutooth so it can connect to an app on your phone. With the machine not having a direct internet connection, the app can collect diagnostics, metrics and do software updates. Require you to press a button in the machine to pair it to your phone.
99% of the functionality with 0 annoyance and ~0 security/privacy risks.
But that still requires installing their app on a mobile device, and that app will still have invasive access to data and internet, etc. If we have to have an "app" I'd much rather it be a built-in web server (despite the inevitable security decay) that serves up a local-only web interface. Best scenario though is to just give me hardware controls and a simple display :-)
Apps require permissions and they can't just sniff the network willy nilly. Any IoT device on your network has way more access to privacy-related things than apps.
Why ?! Audio diagnostic is passive and (I suppose/hope) associated with a button (?).
Can we stop putting obligatory (hackable) active network devices everywhere ?
For basic diagnostics that is enough, but if you want to do more data-intensive stuff (including software updates) you need something more.
Yes! I've been thinking about bluetooth and a standard protocol and generic app. You'd get basic gui functionality for any compliant device, showing whatever device specific stuff the manufacturer wants.
Kinda of like a bluetooth X-terminal, but way way simpler. Think tkinter over bluetooth, probably sans canvas.
A bunch of people will say to just use wifi, make the device a Hotspot, and use your web browser. That's not a bad idea, but tiny devices aren't going to run web servers dishing out multi megabits frameworks.
> I've been thinking about bluetooth and a standard protocol and generic app.
A long time ago I developed a project called "Handbag[0] for Android"[1] based around a similar concept--it targeted the short-lived "Android Open Accessory Protocol" initially over USB & later also over network/WiFi.
(My project notes from the time mentioned a long-term goal of also supporting Bluetooth but that never eventuated...)
Handbag made use of a "generic" Android app for UI display/interaction and an Arduino library that communicated with the app over a binary protocol.
The app would display various UI widgets such as labels/progress bars to display feedback from the accessory and text inputs/buttons to accept input forwarded to the accessory.
While the project did not take the world by storm, I was reminded when digging up these links that at least one person called the concept genius[2]. :)
----
[0] Because it let you "accessorize your Android phone or tablet". :D
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130205135845/http://handbagdev...
[2] https://www.doctormonk.com/2011/11/handbag-android-and-ardui...
If you afford a bluetooth chip you can definitely definitely afford a CPU that can push 2-5mb HTML files through it in reasonable time (you can pre-gzip it) and some flash storage (which you probably already need if you are any kind of metrics over time).
It could be hard to encode JSON messages dynamically for the actual data to show in the web application, but you _can_ use other protocols from a browser too (CBOR is quite popular for this).
>> If you afford a bluetooth chip you can definitely definitely afford a CPU that can push 2-5mb HTML files through it in reasonable time
Maybe not. I'm using a micro controller with specific peripherals and ADC requirements for a high speed control system. This has less RAM and flash that you can probably get away with for a web server. We'd have to add a bluetooth radio chip, but I hear those go for well under $1. There are all kinds of embedded devices that have few resources but could be expanded with cheap Bluetooth connectivity. I realize this is changing quickly, but there will always be very small devices.
Yes running a full blown web server with HTTP support requires a bigger CPU and RAM, but don't need a lot of RAM or CPU to stream an HTLM file through blutooth from flash storage. Serving data over blutooth for that HTML application would need some custom stuff (because it would go over blutooth and JSON-encoding for messages would probably require too many resources). My point is that it is definitely possible to serve a HTML file over blutooth, render it in a app through an WebView and have the app communicate to the device over blutooth without putting a beefy CPU in there.
The product I worked on the bluetooth chip was more expensive than the CPU if memory serves me right and we did something similar. But I am not a board designer or procurement expert.
Or flashing led and use mobile phone camera to scan it.
Back in the days infrared connection was a thing. I remember connecting my Compaq iPAQ PDA to Nokia phone.
Wonder if the modern cellphone cameras are fast enough to act as receiver and if this supported one way communication.
> Or flashing led and use mobile phone camera to scan it
Miele uses flashing LED as some sort of serial communication.
How about a wifi feature that is useful on a LAN and doesn't need 'the cloud'? The annoying part of wifi appliances is that network connectivity almost always means phoning home to some server on WAN. Home routers or a separate box on LAN ought to have functionality to be the bridge between appliances and client devices instead. That's a standard I'd rather see.
Because most people don't have anything on the LAN that can integrate with the appliance, and with just a phone app and the appliance, you're limited in computing power, background activity and storage (you can't store all usage data on the machine itself, and you can't rely on the phone always being on the same wifi to collect the data and store it).
"you can't store all usage data on the machine itself"
I can buy 128M flash for $2/10k
> Yea - I know. Works much better to upsell "wifi enabled"
A good marketer could give a catchy name to sell the advantages of that system too. Top of my head I can think of "near-fi", but certainly could be done better.
"Spyware and asbestos free"
Spyware, and asbestos free!
("Sugar, Free Donuts" - The Simpsons)
D'oh! I realize now, I should have wrote it as:
Spyware and asbestos, free!
This reminds me that Fischer & washing machines have an Easter egg where they can use that beeper to play God Defend New Zealand.
Or just codes that you can look up. Most washers have a small LCD screen capable of displaying two digits.
> Wouldn't it be great if a universal standard existed for devices sending their diagnosis via audio?
LG must have some internal standard for this feature. If they would just publish it and then that could be the standard.
Edit: to the downvotetards, if you worked in actual engineering like I do, then you would understand that this is how most standards naturally materialize. Someone does one thing particularly well, it becomes the standard.
No, that might be the beginning of the standard, because once it's published you realize they don't have a version number or vendor ID or any way to add fields other than the ones they hard coded or whatnot. But it's a start and it would be great if they did it!
This sounds like great use of technology if you ask me. The only thing I'd complain about is that data would not be E2E encrypted :)
In terms of a threat-risk analysis, the need of a physical microphone nearby i imagine more than makes up for the risk of an adversary knowing your water quality and electrical consumption as measured by your washer in almost everyones lives atleast..
It also indicates when you are home or out, and likely an estimate of how many people live there. It could collect more data.
Those pieces of data are combined with others, to form a full picture. This device doesn't need to collect it all itself.
Survellance of private citizens is arguably the foundation of the very dangerous problems in societies around the world, taking away freedom, health, peace, and for most, prosperity. When do you stop it?
If someone can get a bug into my home I'm pretty sure they already know how many people live there and whether we're home..
Ad if someone is bugging my home I think the data transfer from my dishwasher is quite literally the least of my worries.
> It also indicates when you are home or out
Yeah, being able to record sounds that the washer makes would probably also enable you to analyze things people say and extract much more information than 'how many people live there' and 'are they home or not'.
But fortunately for us, you need to actually press a physical button to make the machine sing the diagnostics..
I think you might have missed OPs point being about acoustically sending data rather than using bluetooth/WiFi.
If someone is close enough to your home to listen to your washing machine (or more likely, inside) they can probably hear/see you more directly.
> I think you might have missed OPs point being about acoustically sending data rather than using bluetooth/WiFi
I did! Thanks.
the use of customer-central water usage data piques my interest. there's a huge market for selling water and waste data to advertisers and other companies interested in consumer data. This is one of my friend's startups, smartpipes, which is a type of smart sewage pipe - these smart washers remind me of smartpipe (which supports dishwasher waste!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ
Why can't it be E2E encrypted? If you can encode data on sound waves, surely you can encode encrypted data on sound waves.
Seems to me like the overhead it would add would way outweigh the benefit for the use case. I wouldn't want to wait an extra 10 seconds for the audio to finish transmitting every time just to prevent nonexistent spies in my kitchen from listening in.
The data/time overhead would be negligible. Engineering overhead to implement it on the other hand, perhaps not.
> The data/time overhead would be negligible.
Doubling or tripling the amount of data sent would be negligible over a wire, but an audio protocol won't be as snappy. Then there's the matter of trust/decryption. How are those keys being kept safe? What happens if I lose access?
You can encrypt data and keep the exact same original byte size.
If you're using symmetric encryption, sure. And then every dishwasher has the same symmetric key, guaranteeing it'll leak.
Everything uses symmetric encryption, including asymmetric encryption. Using symmetric encryption doesn't mean you'd use the same key for every dishwasher, you'd obviously just pair the devices and generate a new key, like everything does nowadays. Also, my dishwasher doesn't use any sort of encryption, and it still leaks.
> The way "Smart Diagnosis" in the app works with the WM3400CW is that the washing machine sends the data to the app acoustically.
My LG microwave has this too; it wasn't a selling point for me, but I thought it was a nice compromise by their engineers and product team.
That sounds perfect. This needs to go on a list for the next time I need to replace a dishwasher.
Smart diagnostic sounds good but make it available via Bluetooth or make the dishwasher run a webserver on the local lan.
Having to go through their site and their auth means they ultimately control the appliance I paid full price for.
> The way "Smart Diagnosis" in the app works with the WM3400CW is that the washing machine sends the data to the app acoustically. Press the button sequence to start a diagnosis on the washing machine and it sounds very similar to an old analog modem. The app listens to that with your phone's microphone.
This sounds far, far better to me - and just goes to show it's not necessary for everything to be connected to the Internet...
Why not just use Bluetooth? I'd be suspicious if the Dishwasher app requested permission to access the phone's microphone
You can implement an audio modem with much dumber hardware and it would be cheaper and less vulnerable to nonsense, especially if all you're sending is a few bytes. Then you also don't need to do FCC certification. Seriously bitbanging an audio modem to broadcast error codes from a $0.20 BOM microcontroller and a little buzzer speaker would be a fun project to give to a summer intern. (If anyone wants to believe a highly falsified resume and would believe I'm 15 years younger, I'd be happy to join your company for the summer :D <sadly not really> )
If your hardware has a clock >32Khz, you need FCC certification. It doesn't matter if it deliberately uses radio or not, last I checked.
For energy usage, a metering plug on the same outlet you use is very cheap. For water, just take the bendy pipe and put it onto a big container and see how much water it uses. It shouldn't change much so you do it once. Wifi and the whole cloud for this seems weird.
Acoustically? That's pretty neat and seems a lot less invasive, while still being useful.