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LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

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Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could easily see it measuring the forces and weight on the drum every 5 seconds (or even every 10 ms) during the whole wash, to be able to produce charts of vibration patterns, that engineers could use to correlate with failure. Remember -- when you're spinning at high speed to wring out the water, it's actually some pretty crazy strong forces. Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor…

"Even easier if it's in XML or JSON rather than a CSV." Yes indeed, but compression algorithms are not that new.

Sure, but it's also easy to imagine an engineer just forgetting to or not bothering because it wasn't in the spec.

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ios devices (unsure about android) use random MACs on wireless networks by default. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102509

Random aside for this, I believe this functionality existed for many years but actually hasn’t worked until recently. (Take this with a grain of salt)

I had to turn random MAC off, my google mesh could not handle it. Wifi on my samsung phone would only work for a couple of minutes.

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ios devices (unsure about android) use random MACs on wireless networks by default. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102509

The random MAC would still be within the vendor prefix though, and a MAC address won’t identity a specific device type anyway. Edit: I’m wrong

No it isn’t, vendor prefixes are sort of an anachronism. Bit 41 - bit 1 of the first octet is reserved for local (random) use. That and the group bit (40) set to 0 means the second digit of the human readable MAC is 2, 6, A or E, but that’s it.

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#125
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm totally with you, except a notification that it's finished would actually be really helpful. It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; I've got one lying around so might try to implement that soon, to complement my hacky RPi-Ring-doorbell-announcer :)

Even dumber: I sense when the washer door has been closed longer than 70 minutes (the longest cycle is just shy of that), and start making a loud noise, which continues until the door is opened. Simple as that, no wireless components required. I simply leave the door open when the machine isn't running.

People want notifications so they knew immediately when the laundry is ready: Either to take it out before it gets musty, or to start another load as soon as possible.

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#126
If I'm being charitable, I assume most of these IoT devices that could just use local-only networking for basic functionality do it through a central (Internet) server for 'security'.

If the device just opened a simple TCP/HTTP server on your network for phone app access, there would be dozens of breathless articles from the typical low-quality technology sites claiming that your washing machine can easily be monitored by hackers. By hitting a specific LG domain and verifying/pinning certs, the vendor can ostensibly secure that central API and easily make updates if issues are found.

It sure seems like it would be much cheaper to have the device simply connect to Wifi and be able to respond to simple TCP packets (TP-LINK smart switches do this) rather than build all this centralized infrastructure that costs money in perpetuity.

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#127

> In a follow-up post a day after his initial Tweet, Johnie noted “inaccuracy in the ASUS router tool.” Other LG smart washing machine users showed device data use from their apps. It turns out that these appliances more typically use less than 1MB per day.

A megabyte a day still seems excessive.

Just checked mine which is used all the time and it's about 1.5mb per week.

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#128
I have a LG washing machine and LG dryer that are wifi connected. I keep 90 days of netflow data. Both have used about 10mb total over the last 90 days, 100% on port 8883 tcp back to AWS EC2 owned IP addresses. Typically less than 100kb/day with a high of 2mb/day and a low of 12kb/day.

Looking at the calendar, this corresponds to days we ran loads vs idle no use days. I'm okay with this level of data usage.

Re: LG washing machine sending 3.7GB of data a day

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need an entire megabyte for that? Even if you did laundry five times a day, it shouldn't take more than a few bytes to store a few metrics. Even if you're lazy and uploaded an uncompressed JSON array of objects, that shouldn't be more than a few kB. Way less if you compress it. A megabyte is a LOT of data.

I could easily see it measuring the forces and weight on the drum every 5 seconds (or even every 10 ms) during the whole wash, to be able to produce charts of vibration patterns, that engineers could use to correlate with failure. Remember -- when you're spinning at high speed to wring out the water, it's actually some pretty crazy strong forces. Or other things measured every ~second, like stuff related to the motor…

When I worked in a storage group years ago, the system that controls swipe card access for a building generated something like 3TB of Java exceptions a month.

Because of the criticality, it was on high tier reliable SAN storage, replicated to a second site. IIRC, storage was like $80 Gb/mo.

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