

Arduino Controlled Dishwasher - signa11
http://www.neonsquirt.com/dishwasher.html

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dhx
Every dishwasher needs an LCD panel that reads "The dishes are CLEAN"

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Osiris
And every dishwasher needs an option to not reset the _clean_ setting it the
door was just opened and closed within a few seconds. I loved his idea to only
reset it if it's open for a few minutes, indicating enough time to have
emptied the dishwasher.

I wonder if he think his little project was worth not buying the $150
replacement part? Clearly it was a lot of fun.

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tocomment
That's a really great idea! You should patent it.

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js2
I own Fisher & Paykel dish drawers. They are mostly wonderfully engineered. A
clever bit about them: they open the fill falve and shortly after start the
wash motor. Then they measure the draw of the motor circuit. When the draw is
sufficient (due to the motor working harder against the water), they know
enough water has entered and close the fill falve. At one point, one of my
fill valves failed and the water wasn't entering quickly enough. This
eventually triggers a timer, and the drawers shuts down telling you the water
isn't entering quickly enough. Mechanically, you can also work on them almost
without tools. Anyway, just thought I'd post a bit because I really appreciate
good design.

(They also have an interesting bit of poor design that has caused them to leak
out water onto my floor after a plastic part broke. Sigh.)

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thomasfl
When consumers start wanting their home electronics to be future proof, they
will one day be looking for the Aurdino logo in the product information.

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ippisl
The main thing preventing appliances from becoming future proofed is crappy
parts(mostly the mechanical parts). For example, in the past a washing machine
had lasted 20 years. today it's 3-4 years.

There are high end brands who have a guarantee of more than 10 years, but
they're expensive and the cost per year comes about the same as the cheap
ones.

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Groxx
And after those 3-4 years, you can probably get one that washes better,
quieter, and uses less water and energy (all of the above perhaps only
marginally), for the same yearly price. It's not really _that_ bad of a trade-
off.

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bisrig
Thinking about this in terms of what low-level actions are being performed by
the Arduino (relay closures, sensor readings, basic I/O), it strikes me how
this can be an alternative/complement to platforms like LabView. I feel this
is significant due to the prevalence of these platforms in engineering
education as well as in industry R&D, test labs, etc. - in my opinion, the
more (different) tools that are available and to which people are exposed, the
more likely these people will be engaged (in the case of engineering
education) or able to get their jobs done.

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cnvogel
Yes, of course it's a good complement for industrial or laboratory automation,
test automation, industrial control. There are loads of different ways to
solve these kinds of things, and they are all used somewhere...

But in bigger companies, there's the issue of standardisation: A company
policy might mandate that all test-automation has to be done with LabView, so
even a simple "dishwasher complexity" device might be implemented on a
dedicated PC because it's just cheaper to shell out the $1000 for hardware
than to re-train engineers to do Arduino on a $20 board.

Or some other company (possibly more industrial automation inclinded) might do
everything with Siemens-S7 controllers.

This is why in reality you often see things setup with the apparently wrong
tool for the job, but limiting the number of choices might make (business)
sense.

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skeletonjelly
Reminds me of the project that a guy added twitter support to his washing
machine. I for one would like to know when my washing is done without having
to walk all the way down the stairs =)

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Mvandenbergh
If you want to shorten the innovation cycle in any product to be more like
that of software, the easiest, most trivial way to do so is to make it
software upgradeable.

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xutopia
Funny that. My Maytag just failed with the same problem he mentioned except
where I live (Canada) it's 300$ for the part + installation.

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georgieporgie
Random Arduino/electronics tip: the Sharp S202S02F relay ($4 at Parallax) is
an awesome little solid state relay that will do 8A at 240V.

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cnvogel
This device might deal quite badly with inductive loads such as the dishwasher
motor or heating element (often wound in a spiral).

The lifetime of the solid-state-relay will be reduced if you don't use the
proper subber circuits (see for example the S202S02F datasheet found as the
first google hit).

A old-school mechanical relay might be a better fit.

To drive mechanical relays, the ULN2003 is a very handy part. It's 7
transistors + freewheeling diodes + resistors in one 16pin DIP.

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georgieporgie
Interesting. I'm curious as to why it would be bad with inductive loads, since
the first application listed includes motors and heaters.

Thanks for pointing out the snubber circuit. I hadn't noticed and am about to
build a project with the S202. :-)

