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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

#101

Post by karim79 »

hamandcheese wrote: post #6

I'm not opposed to smart homes, I love being able to turn my lights on and off from across the room. But I don't know if I understand the use case for a networked washing machine.

Most people I know who have the connected "white" appliances are mostly interested in the reported resource usage. I have a connected LG dishwasher, and it's possible to have it report water usage, electricity usage, and other stats to home automation hubs (like home assistant) for aggregation.

I'm not so into that, but I know people who buy connected domestic things for that very reason.

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

#102

Post by Brian_K_White »

quitit wrote: post #49
dotancohen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iRobot, the robotic vacuum cleaner company that leaked photos of people on the toilet as viewed from the vacuum cleaners' cameras, is an American company. If I'm not mistaken they grew out of MIT.

That's rather cherry-picked. The information you left out: 1. Those were test units, not purchased devices used by customers. 2. For consumer Roomba devices that include a camera: photographic data is not sent to iRobot for processing. 3. The test data for the images you mentioned was leaked by a 3rd party based in Venezuela. 4. These test devices were operated by employees and volunteers in exchange for rewards. The…

The data and the means to collect and deliver it, EXISTS AT ALL.

Cameras are just the lurid example. Audio is just as bad or even worse. Anything that can hear at all, knows everything that's going on in the whole property and even surrounding area.

And, practically any sensor of any type regardless of nominal intended purpose, can hear. In fact circuit boards with no actual sensors of any kind, can hear.

A light switch with no mobility and no apparent sensors like a camera or mic, not even a light sensor for automatic adjusting, can hear and report if someone is having a fight or having sex 4 rooms and 2 floors away.

600 items of "evidence" that Roomba doesn't misbehave means absolutely nothing.

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

#103

Post by hutzlibu »

crazygringo wrote: post #86
solardev wrote: post #70

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…

"Even easier if it's in XML or JSON rather than a CSV."

Yes indeed, but compression algorithms are not that new.

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

#104

Post by wkat4242 »

yakz wrote: post #46
monospaced wrote: post #2

> 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.

My Ubiquiti UniFi UDM is not good at device identification. It's kind of annoying because I have this big list of devices on the network and it's peppered with devices that I know don't exist. I'd appreciate it if it said something like "Maybe iPad Air", instead of just "iPad Pro 2nd Gen" when I know no such device is on my network.

You can fix this by setting fixed IPs. But yes Unifi is not great at this.

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

#105

Post by hutzlibu »

kioleanu wrote: post #42
sroussey wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Miele washer and dryer send me notifications when done.

That is, I think, the only valid use case. I have an AEG washer that does some voodoo to decide wash times and only shows the estimate at the start, then it weighs the clothes, looks at how dirty they are and so on. The washer is two floors down and I never know when it’s actually done. As a side note, I think my washer is “smart” ready, meaning it has all the electronics already in and the panel has the lights alrea…

"but I doubt that people paying top dollar for these appliances are the type to keep an eye on such things."

Some people do - to brag in their circles (and to their own consciousness) how green they are. So then you can go flying around the world for fun with a clear consciousness ...

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

#106

Post by kortilla »

dotancohen wrote: post #22
amelius wrote: post #16

Well it's still better than a Chinese robotic vacuum cleaner with a bunch of cameras doing it.

iRobot, the robotic vacuum cleaner company that leaked photos of people on the toilet as viewed from the vacuum cleaners' cameras, is an American company. If I'm not mistaken they grew out of MIT.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i... For those that didn’t hear

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

#107

Post by Brian_K_White »

boringuser2 wrote: post #21
globular-toast wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Zigbee is the way to go. But the point is there shouldn't be any internet involved. Using the internet protocol on wifi is the stupidest way to do this kind of stuff and leads to dumb crap like your washing machine phoning home.

I mean, it's obviously a pretty good product in terms of effortlessly providing networking to a device in a way that an average home user can manage. Everyone has wifi. That being said, a better architected device would probably just use Bluetooth and your smartphone as a controller. I don't think many average home users could tell the difference.

I have a label printer that works like that and I hate it.

I'm not sure what the better answer is now that I am trying to think of one. Maybe all I really hate is how shitty and lack of control the app is. It requires me to turn on location, and does who the f knows what on the network between the app and brother. I do not want to have to turn on location to use a label printer. No matter the tech excuse about detecting proximity, something has simply gone off the rails at that point.

But using Bluetooth as a local connection, I guess that's OK if the protocol were just open and I could choose the app to use with it.

Devices with web servers have that one big plus, which is that you use your browser, not someone else's browser.

Make the same sort of genericization on bluetooth and that would probably satisfy a good number of use cases.

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

#108

Post by wt__ »

lloeki wrote: post #35
mft_ wrote: 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 :)

> It's apparently possible to track a washing machine's progress with a smart switch that monitors power draw; Can confirm, it's what I do. I can even detect which part of the cycle it is in using plain Home Assistant template sensors. It's crude but it works. Detecting washing vs not is trivial, but I went the extra mile, looking at the power history and analysed the thing visually to get the general profile of each…

I guess it might be quite fun to graph that and overlay the graph of the current cycle over an original benchmark - it might indicate when, for example, the heating element was no longer working as efficiently.

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

#109

Post by tayo42 »

solardev wrote: post #92
crazygringo wrote: post #86

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…

You really think they're going to measure all that, upload it, send it to some expensive engineer, have them try to physically model the error, and then... what? That might make sense during development, but there's no way they do that in a consumer product. If a part breaks they're just going to send out a replacement or the repair guy is gonna get some third party part. Recording that much detail would just be nois…

I would suspect they measure everything and use almost none of it. Like most web services. This was a common complaint and low hanging fruit optimization, that people were storing metrics that never got read. Just in case.

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

#110

Post by l33tman »

kioleanu wrote: post #42
sroussey wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Miele washer and dryer send me notifications when done.

That is, I think, the only valid use case. I have an AEG washer that does some voodoo to decide wash times and only shows the estimate at the start, then it weighs the clothes, looks at how dirty they are and so on. The washer is two floors down and I never know when it’s actually done. As a side note, I think my washer is “smart” ready, meaning it has all the electronics already in and the panel has the lights alrea…

I sometimes use it to start the machine remotely when I'm away the whole day, so I can time it to be ready when I get home and can switch over the clothes to the tumbler immediately.
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