Great hack, but I’m sure any engineer worth their salt winces at the thought of a machine in their home roundtripping through far away 3rd party servers (I guess they’re the manufacturer’s, but if it’s hardware I own in my house those servers are 3rd party to me) just to notify them of a numerical value when they’re sitting literally 10 meters away (I live in the countryside and experience internet interruptions not infrequently, things running locally matter a lot to me).
I was thinking the other day as I was remodeling my kitchen that I would happily pay several times the price of regular appliances (fridge, clothes washer, dish washer) if they were built with a tasteful, minimalist design (eg 1960s Braun style), quality materials, and fully open source PCB/firmware/schematics/etc. I’m probably not the only one. It’d be a weird niche market but perhaps there’s something there.
If you tie it with the building consumer awareness of right to repair, anti consumerism, planned obsolescence, etc, the marketing just writes itself.
Maybe that’s a kind of company I want to start myself, having worked in consumer hardware for a long time and thinking about my next step, but if anyone wants to take the idea go ahead.
I was thinking the other day as I was remodeling my kitchen that I would happily pay several times the price of regular appliances (fridge, clothes washer, dish washer) if they were built with a tasteful, minimalist design (eg 1960s Braun style), quality materials, and fully open source PCB/firmware/schematics/etc. I’m probably not the only one. It’d be a weird niche market but perhaps there’s something there.
If you tie it with the building consumer awareness of right to repair, anti consumerism, planned obsolescence, etc, the marketing just writes itself.
Maybe that’s a kind of company I want to start myself, having worked in consumer hardware for a long time and thinking about my next step, but if anyone wants to take the idea go ahead.