I have, in a drawer in my office, the motor and an absolutely fascinating motor drive board from an Electrolux washing machine that a colleague brought in. It appears to be a three-phase variable frequency drive (VFD) with an elegant architecture - an optically isolated digital interface to the rest of the controls allows it to use simple shunts for current sensing - and stunning attention to cost, with details like a silver through hole CEM-3 PCB. (note this is no longer cheaper than plated-through FR4). It does have a monster TI DSP on it.
It's about 20 years old. Your appliances have been more sophisticated than you think for longer than you think.
It is surprising, of course, that someone would rip up a new washing machine for parts, but not shocking. I imagine it would have to be very specifically for low-volume, high margin industrial equipment, which the article hints at but does not make explicit.
Indeed, and in some cases the experiences have gotten worse.
There's a Youtube channel named Technology Connections and he has several videos on this topic that I recommend. This one about Sunbeam toasters from 50+ years ago is particularly great:
It's a great channel. I was also fascinated by his rice cooker episode. I had no idea they were so clever, combining thermodynamics and the physics of magnetism.
LOL. Few years ago I was considering using VFD and motor from a washing machine for one of my commercial projects. Unfortunately the replacement part supplier had very limited stock so I went on to sourcing the motors and implementing controller myself which turned out to be more expensive.
I read long ago that the SCR-584 was prototyped with washing machine parts, but the actual quote I found was "We would buy a washing machine if it would bring a quicker result."
I don't believe it-- at least not the claim that it's actually "washing machines".
Has anyone ever looked at washing machine PCB's?
They're conformally coated with silicone. The whole control board with "the brains" is dipped into goo to protect it from the harsh, wet environment of a washer. The effect is that it makes component-level repair, let alone part-harvesting, intractable.
In the past three years I've repaired two washing machines whose main PCBs were not coated (neither were they broken, the washaing machines were defective elsewhere). One was a Beko, so more on the cheap side, and one was some Aldi-branded Italian make I haven't heard of before. I think the name was Whirlpool. It was extremely cheap and the connectors burned after a few years of use, taking the main PCB down with them. But even the replacement part was not coated.
I think only the more upscale or expensive ones are coated for longevity.
Whirlpool is not "some Aldi-branded Italian make", it's an extremely common American white goods producer. They used to be well-known for the robustness of their machines.
That's why I said they used to be well-known for it, I don't really know much about them today. But either way, Whirlpool is American, not German-Italian.
It seems I was mistaken, I replied on your other comment as well. It's been a few years since I fixed that specific model. The burned PCB was by a manufacturer called Minisel, and I think variants of Minisel control units are used in many cheap washing machines like Beko, Bauknecht, Elin, Whirpool and probably other. Maybe that's why I confused the brands. Ebay ist still full of these units [1].
Your comment made me curious, so I looked into my old photos. It seems I was mistaken, it's been a few years. It's not a Whirpool but simple a "WM 25E" ("WM" probably for washing machine). Apparently the same model is also branded as "Elin WM 25E".
This forum thread [1] show the exact PCB that burned out in my machine, I've bought the replacement on ebay back then. There was some motorola µc on it and several run of the mill components, but no adhesive or "goo".
Earlier in my career I was working on components of undersea seismic nodes that were both conformal coated and potted in epoxy. Along the way we realized we were going to have to make a blue wire mod to the PCBs already deployed or loose quite a bit of money. We developed processes to rework these PCBs very effectively, although I can not reveal details. Suffice it to say it was not a fun process, but it was deemed necessary.
Sometimes when all your solutions are bad, you just have to pick the least bad solution. It's still not a good solution, but not solving it is worse. If it is the only available device they know of with the chip they need, they might not have another option.
That's interesting. The Samsung's I've services have had conformal coating on the "mainboard". This is the board that has the relays. The board directly behind the control panel has been without coating, but that was just LED's and some switches.
Must vary from manufacturer to manufacturer - this is a Bosch that's now coming up to about 11 years old, and thankfully still going strong after a temperature sensor and heating element swap a few years ago.
Title is misleading, like other mentioned. My first reaction was: “Wow, what an irony, ASML makes the machines that makes the chips”. Second reaction: “No way ASML machines and washing machines could be powered by the same type of chip”.
I hope this crisis moves industry just an inch towards better “right to fix”. Engineering decisions that make for the serviceable products will help reusability as well
And these generic $0.05 microcontrollers have enough power for high precision numeric calculations or high speed signal processing. Maybe not for audiovisual data streams, but you would be surprised how fast even these chips have become.
I call at least partial BS on this claim. In the US, you can't sell as "new" anything that has even a single "used" part in it. That's to protect consumers from, say, buying an electronic vehicle only to find that the battery only has one year left of expected lifetime.
So, the rumor certainly isn't true for any mass consumer products, though perhaps if you're making zillion-dollar specialty equipment where each sale is high-touch, you can have the customer acknowledge in writing that the device is being sold as "used", and perhaps even guarantee a replacement for the used part within some amount of time. Of course, if a company wants to use cannibalized washer parts for some internal purpose, that's just fine.
You are kind of comparing apples to oranges. In most cases a used chip will work just as good as new - and probably be proven more reliable as it has been already tested in a working device.
And how do you define "used"? If a module with a chip has been placed in a test harness, is it now used?
> and perhaps even guarantee a replacement for the used part within some amount of time.
The definition of "used" is approximately "delivered to a customer". Doesn't even matter if they returned the box unopened, and got a refund; you still can't sell it as "new".
And, no, I'm not speaking of a "warranty." A warranty means "we'll fix it if anything breaks over a certain time period, perhaps with a refurbished part". That's different than "we'll replace this particular part with a new one as soon as we can, even if it's still working, to make sure you get the entire expected MTBF (as that's typically much longer than the overall warranty for the whole device)"
It's also wrong to think of used chips being as good as new. Yes, you avoid "infant mortality" (though that seems to be less of an issue than it used to be), but how do you know what environment the washing machine was run in? Thermal and power shocks decrease the lifespan, never mind humidity and static electricity. And even if the environment had been perfect, what about electromigration?
That's exactly the reason you can't put used parts into a device sold as new. If you still disagree with this regulation, you're best advised to take it up with the FTC rather than blithely choose to ignore it.
> Doesn't even matter if they returned the box unopened, and got a refund; you still can't sell it as "new".
That simply doesn’t track with reality. If I return a good to Target, unopened, it is being put back on the shelf with no indication that it was ever sold previously.
The statement is pretty vague, so it could be that the chips are destined for some company's assembly line for something like a PLC, rather than in the products themselves.
"citation needed" is an overused debating point that makes the opponent look better, regardless he's obviously talking about 16 CFR § 20.1 specifically subsection (a).
Note that its trivial to work around. I purchased a bluetooth earpiece on Monday on amazon and its trivial to control-F around looking for the word "new". You will NOT find that word on any marketing. I don't believe any part of it is reused or recycled, however they're not dumb enough to use the word "new" in writing anywhere.
That looked like a genuine request to me. Besides, some things really are questionable at a surface glance, but generally useful if and only if we know for sure they are factually true and the words used are precisely correct.
If true, that must depend on some specific definition of 'new', since new auto parts are often built on old cores. That's why they give you cash back for the cores.
Maybe there's some fine print somewhere that describes the part as 'remanufactured', but when you ask for a new, say, brake caliper, that's what you'll usually get.
When your supplier decommits on your order, new order lead times are > 52 weeks and the open market price is 2 orders of magnitude higher than buying new, this starts to make some sense. Either you find a way to make product to sell, or you don't sell any product. It's ugly out there right now.
I do the occasional hardware design. I just started a new project and I can't find the parts I need new in stock at distributors. However, I have unused stock, still in antistatic packaging with 1990's vintage date codes. Never thought I'd ever use another DIP part again!
Customer doesn't care: they just want their boards delivered.
So ironic. I always keep the idea of getting parts from disassembly as an example of things that you can do at small scale that aren’t viable at larger scale.
i.e. as a hobbyist you can’t compete with a large manufacturer w.r.t. large orders that get low per unit costs, but you can repurpose old parts cheaper (for your metric for cost) than they can.
That's what many smaller manufacturers have been doing.
Tracking down consumer electronics that contains required chips, desoldering, cleaning and then soldering on their devices.
It's a manual work, but can be done quickly depending on a chip.
There are some assemblers in China that are doing this too, but pricing is prohibitive for most cases. For instance, a chip that cost $9 before the crisis now costs >$100 + assembly.
A toy with the same chip you can get for $5-$15 depending on volume, then it is 10 minute labour to remove the chip, clean it and put it on the target PCB (I do not include the final cleaning time).
If you watch youtube videos about switching power supply teardowns, like "diodegonewild" you'll see that no-name switching power supplies from China generally have fake electrolytic capacitors now a days. If your circuit needs a 400 V 5 uF cap, just desolder and peel off the label on literally "any" capacitor then put a shrink sleeve label saying 400V 5uF and call it good. If it handles 400V that's great for everyone, if it doesn't, then just blame the customer for misuse or make it too hard to return a $2 no-name phone charger. Put a well regarded label on the fake cap, I suspect China ships more caps with ChemiCon labels, than ChemiCon themselves actually manufacture, LOL.
I remember making someone on arduino.cc angry because I pointed out that it was very unlikely that Omron actually made the relays on their $6 relay "shield." Or, if they were genuine Omron relays, probably were pulled off other equipment.
My first employer (early 90's) would buy large lots of "pulls" for a fraction of the price that Arrow, Future or Digi-Key charged for new components. I'm guessing those sources are still available, just not as widely publicized these days.
Relays drop in price with volume much faster than many other parts. I'd believe it if it were 12v "sugar cube" types, which a quick search tells me it probably wasn't.
Is this the first step in getting companies to manage the full lifecycle of their products? I've long believed that companies should be required to take back every product they produce and deal with the waste themselves - they're now motivated to do this, partially at least, due to resource shortages.
Who is "the company" in an economic system of infinite middlemen?
It would be an interesting way to drive a final stake into the heart of brick and mortar retail; if everything is shipped FROM China for nearly free but shipping TO China costs $25/pound then very rapidly the only way to buy anything will be AliExpress.
Remember, "take back" doesn't mean much. Accepts postal delivery? We already have infrastructure for that.
If only there is an OpenWashingMachine repo where one can obtain cycle details an what not, perhaps the DIYers can bring these back to life with arduinos and RPis.
You can just watch the cycles and write it down, it's boring and rather time consuming.
Hoover actually had a model with programmable cycles (you put your custom cycle on Android and upload it via an NFC tag on the washer). What you could set was very limited, but they tried, I guess.
To the extent the DIY "community" has the level of talent that it takes to do a 3/4 HP variable frequency drive, which you'd need for the better washers out there even before you got to cycle management, it's doing things like model airplane autopilots and automobile ECUs, which are a lot more fun.
I doubt this is true, because modern electronics are so highly integrated that it would be quite difficult to remove the SMD, or possibly BGA CPU/SOC, and particularly in a washing machine it would be encased in silicone or some other waterproofing.
I'm not sure why more-modular electronics are not more of a thing.
For example, blue-pill STM boards are very cheap, because they are produced in millions. Similarly for many other modules.
How is it cheaper to design and produce a relatively limited run of integrated, custom washing machine control electronics, instead of a simple 'baseboard' and a bunch of really-really-mass-produced modules?
The later modular design would be a boon for legibility, repairability, re-usability, supply-chain resilience, etc, etc.
or... maybe there's so much volume at the top of washing machines (above the water, where the controls are) that you could place the board there, where chips:
- don't need waterproofing
- don't need to be tightly integrated
- can be fully COTS since the logic is relatively dead simple
I've had 2 washing machines die in as many years, and the electronics were encased in silicone.
Of course, a repair involves replacing the entire proprietary electronics assembly (multiple PCBs, and plastic frame), and is just not economical, so the entire machine, valves, motor, steel drum and cabinet, are written-off because a mosfet failed, or whatever.
If the electronics were standardized and modular, even if encased in silicone, there would be an economic case to replace just failed modules.
64 KB of flash and 20 KB of RAM on a stereotypical STM32F103 (edited to add weasel words: that's what a blue pill is, correct? I don't actually use them.)
Remember these are not PCs where you slap in a bigger SSD or another stick of DRAM.
I have a F767 dev board on my desk. Kind of the same family, 'F' series anyway, and it has 2M flash and I believe 768K of SRAM.
My latest simple application build (built while posting this) ended up 228744 bytes of flash and 142119 of sram.
What kills modern microcontroller storage is every thread has its own fixed size stack so 1K there, 16K there, pretty soon you've got a lot of RAM in use if you go thread-happy, and on the flash side like every civilized embedded device it has MCUboot so 2M sounds like a lot until you partition it into two bootable partitions for OTA upgrades and MCUboot itself takes 64K or 128K or whatever, and there's a big fat (not FAT32 lol) partition for non-volatile config storage. It doesn't matter what RTOS you're using they all seem to be about the same size in the end, FreeRTOS, Mbed, or Zephyr.
Another point worth making is peripherals, I'm pretty sure the F103 doesn't even HAVE the capability to connect ethernet whereas I'm doing OTA upgrades using wired ethernet using the F767.
Note that for decades now, I guess, its been possible to build a washing machine or a lithography machine as an arduino shield or raspi shield, but nobody does that. The part that would not be a boon would be FCC certification, UL certification, and whatever other safety certifications a product requires.
With respect to washing machines as a homeowner I have had to do some repair work on multiple dishwashers and value engineering is the rule, if it corrodes out in five years needing replacement from the point of view of the mfgr that's a "feature" not a bug. So I've never seen a conformally coated washing machine PCB although I'm sure they exist if you don't buy big-box store garbage. Let me remember... Some piece of trash from Sears from 15 years ago used to ship with mosfets having too small of a heatsink and a voltage rating about 5 volts higher than line voltage and an underpowered pump so the user was encouraged to use the water heating mode in operation to keep the water as hot as possible for the anemic pump resulting in the mosfet blowing out every year or so, replaced the PCB under guarantee about three times and tossed that POS. Got a Bosch from horrible depot and that one has a pump that somehow is anemic AND sounds like a screaming jet engine bearing after a year of use, on the third pump now and just ignore the incredible noise. I'm told for eco reasons the new greenwashing dishwashers use 10% less water but don't work at all so you have to run them three times to clean the dishes resulting in 3x the wear and tear (good for mfgrs) and roughly 170% increase in environmental damage over a non-greenwashing dishwasher.
I don't doubt that some washing machine control units are encased in silicone/epoxy, but not all of them are. I've repaired two which were not, although both were very cheap units. You can see original replacement parts on ebay which aren't encased in silicone either [1].
Because it literally costs money to separate PCB material into separate boards, so there is a minimum cost associated with adding an additional bare board to a design. Which is more than you think.
Connectors also cost money; often more than you'd think. And they add additional points of failure.
Modularity also creates a compatibility matrix you have to track if you're a responsible OEM. I.e. can I use [X,Y,Z] sensor with [Q,R,S] base board and [A,B,C] MCU module and firmware [1,2,3]? In a model that may have shipped with motors [T,U,V]? That's 3^5 combinations right there. Compare that to, say, a single-digit or small two-digit number of actual combinations a manufacturer might ship as revisions over the life cycle of a design. You never have to worry about whether the Q base board will work with the C module in an integrated design.
That $2 blue-pill STM board starts looking expensive really quick compared to the cost of the microcontroller (and maybe the crystals if you really need them) at even modest volumes. It just doesn't cost that much to add a chip or other subcircuit to a PCB design for a real product.
No doubt that is true, although I can imagine that if modules were made in their millions, and soldered (but still replaceable with rework), the cost disparioty would be less, especially with a saving on design/layout cost and the rework and revisions usually involved there.
But the true cost, to the environment, savings due to repairing more modular machines, vs scrapping and manufacturing, shipping, installing, etc whole new machines every few years, could be way less.
What's the advantage of soldering a module in as opposed to soldering a microcontroller? What is the advantage of laying out a new module as opposed to laying out a new integrated board? Why do you think the level of modularity already in an appliance like a washing machine is insufficient?
It's essentially never the microcontroller that fails in something like this, anyway, so you would never repair something by swapping out something like a blue pill dev board. Maybe you would swap in a microcontroller with a different pinout in production that way, to solve a shortage issue, but the development time and costs would be almost identical to just spinning the board. I really don't understand what problem you're trying to solve.
Modularity costs, in a number of ways, and one of them is the material involved. That material will ship in every unit whether it is ever needed or not. When your more modular devices are beyond repair or obsolete or just unwanted all of that material will wind up in the landfill.
Unsoldering a module would be much simpler, if the connection were designed for rework, and modules would be more commoditized.
A simple example is my washing machine that recently died. A mosfet blew on the motor inverter/controller, and obviously took out some other components too. It's silicone-encased, making it infeasible to diagnose and fix compoonent by component. The entire electronics, including psu, mcu, display, buttons, and motor controller are a single unit, and has to be replaced. Since it's specific to the model, it is rare and expensive, and not economical to replace, so the entire machine is now junk, or at best spare parts.
In my fantasy ideal, the motor controller would be a separate board, and fairly standardized to the motor size/design, just like stepper driver boards. The display/ui would be a separate board, since that is a common point of failure. The psu should certainly be a standard board. And the the main control board running the valves etc would again be it's own board. Interfaces and protocols between boards should be standard or at least documented.
Yes, multiple, simpler mcu's. And slightly more material, etc, as you say, though for a washing machine, the added weight of a few electronics hardly matters. But much less custom design, inventory, much more repairable, reusable, upgradeable, hackable, etc.
The washing-machine of Theseus, as it were.
Another example is a toaster oven that recently broke. One of the elements shorted or burned out, it is one of a handful of standard sizes/resistances etc, rather than some custom proprietary design. Nice and modular, just as I want. BUT, the elements are riveted to the rest of the oven, rather than screwed, making a replacement significantly harder, to the point I haven't yet bothered (eg I don't have a metal drill-bit), and I bought a replacement oven (with screwed elements - the search was not trivial). A saving of a couple of cents (riveting vs screwing) for the manufacturer has actually cost me, and the world, much much more. IMHO the repairability of this stuff should be mandated, or at least documented right on the front alongside the energy-efficiency ratings and purchase price, etc.
I doubt very much that the blue pill/black pill boards are produced in anything close to the volume of most consumer products like washing machines.
Those "maker" boards are dirt cheap because (a) the builders can use gray-market parts, including "pulls" (b) there is nothing on the board that isn't absolutely necessary: even the PCB itself tends to be 0.031" FR4 instead of the more robust 0.062" to save money. I've seen some boards in the Arduino ecosystem that clearly used punched holes to save money over drilling.
When you're building tens or hundreds of thousands of something, using a baseboard and daughterboard architecture is going to be far more expensive than putting everything on one board. Hell, I'd go so far to say that if you're building more than 500/year it's not worth it.
I feel that we don't know the full picture of the chip shortage. Is the demand actually up that much, and why? Or is there someone secretly buying a huge number of chips (military, secret crypto mining)?
Well, I'm with the company 23 years, and I've always tried to read the minds of the investors, and I always got it wrong. So don't ask me that question. So, no, it's a place that can only read the minds, not only read the minds, but talk with our customers and see where we are today.
And the issue is, and I tried to mention this before is that, the demand that we're currently seeing comes from so many places in the industry. Technology-wise, market-wise, geography-wise, it's so widespread that we have significantly underestimated, let's say, the width of the demand. And I think that I don't think is going to go away.
And it just -- it's an anecdote, but I met a very large -- the executive of very large industrial company, a conglomerate, last week. And actually, they told me that they're buying washing machines to rip out the semiconductors to put them in industrial modules. I mean, that's happening these days.
Now, you could say, that’s an anecdote. But, to be honest, it happens everywhere. It is -- like I said, it is 15, 20, 25-year old semiconductor technology that is now being used everywhere. It's got -- it's all driven by IoT type applications.
AskHN: Are old-school 1980s/70s discrete and integrated components in demand? I know of a pack-rat with a lot of that-era componentry. Where do people look for sales of private electronics/controllers DIY/learn-it-yourself parts and pieces?
I talked to a used washing machine purchaser who quoted what my washing machine that was used for 2-3 years would be worth. (spoiler alert: not much at all, you're better off buying used)
He told me to check out how unreliable Whirlpool washers are, check it out: https://www.designnews.com/corrosion-outbreak-whirlpool-mach...
Washing machines without chips existed 60 years ago. Chips are a number of advantages, but mechanical timer washing machines can still be found in operation. (I'm not sure if they are still made, I suspect yes)
The people that could build mechanical clocks are probably long dead by now, we would need archaeologists to find their fossilized remains. Maybe they left some note somewhere.
The people who can build mechanical clocks are either working on other things or making high-end wristwatches. There are still people inventing new watch movements.
Yes they are still made. Speed Queen sells them in the US although they try to encourage customers to buy ones with electronic controls and offer a longer warranty on them.
We just gave up a machine from the 1950s. The installer for the new machine looked in amazement that the old unit had still been working until recently (a Kenmore).
Looking to legislate parts availability for ca 5 years is a step, but IMHO it isn't nearly enough for the long run.
Indeed, I still use one. The timer contacts need cleaning once in a very long time (depending on usage) but it's been quite reliable and if something breaks I can probably make or find a replacement relatively easily.
I would not be too surprised if the original source of the (probably partiallly tongue-in-cheek) claim was some supplier of ASML (who obviously at the same time is customer of ASML's customers).
The relevant part being: "But it has become so dire that large industrial companies are buying washing machines in order to rip out the chips and repurpose them, according to ASML CEO Peter Wennink."
I have, in a drawer in my office, the motor and an absolutely fascinating motor drive board from an Electrolux washing machine that a colleague brought in. It appears to be a three-phase variable frequency drive (VFD) with an elegant architecture - an optically isolated digital interface to the rest of the controls allows it to use simple shunts for current sensing - and stunning attention to cost, with details like a silver through hole CEM-3 PCB. (note this is no longer cheaper than plated-through FR4). It does have a monster TI DSP on it.
It's about 20 years old. Your appliances have been more sophisticated than you think for longer than you think.
It is surprising, of course, that someone would rip up a new washing machine for parts, but not shocking. I imagine it would have to be very specifically for low-volume, high margin industrial equipment, which the article hints at but does not make explicit.
Indeed, and in some cases the experiences have gotten worse.
There's a Youtube channel named Technology Connections and he has several videos on this topic that I recommend. This one about Sunbeam toasters from 50+ years ago is particularly great:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLk1cjZ4ll0
It's a great channel. I was also fascinated by his rice cooker episode. I had no idea they were so clever, combining thermodynamics and the physics of magnetism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSTNhvDGbYI
>It's about 20 years old
Back when Electrolux was a reputable brand.
LOL. Few years ago I was considering using VFD and motor from a washing machine for one of my commercial projects. Unfortunately the replacement part supplier had very limited stock so I went on to sourcing the motors and implementing controller myself which turned out to be more expensive.
I read long ago that the SCR-584 was prototyped with washing machine parts, but the actual quote I found was "We would buy a washing machine if it would bring a quicker result."
I don't believe it-- at least not the claim that it's actually "washing machines".
Has anyone ever looked at washing machine PCB's?
They're conformally coated with silicone. The whole control board with "the brains" is dipped into goo to protect it from the harsh, wet environment of a washer. The effect is that it makes component-level repair, let alone part-harvesting, intractable.
In the past three years I've repaired two washing machines whose main PCBs were not coated (neither were they broken, the washaing machines were defective elsewhere). One was a Beko, so more on the cheap side, and one was some Aldi-branded Italian make I haven't heard of before. I think the name was Whirlpool. It was extremely cheap and the connectors burned after a few years of use, taking the main PCB down with them. But even the replacement part was not coated.
I think only the more upscale or expensive ones are coated for longevity.
>Whirlpool
Whirlpool is a major US brand of appliances.
Whirlpool is not "some Aldi-branded Italian make", it's an extremely common American white goods producer. They used to be well-known for the robustness of their machines.
Meh, the Whirlpool of today may be different. Most of these manufacturers ended up in a race to the bottom for making cheap e-waste.
That's why I said they used to be well-known for it, I don't really know much about them today. But either way, Whirlpool is American, not German-Italian.
It seems I was mistaken, I replied on your other comment as well. It's been a few years since I fixed that specific model. The burned PCB was by a manufacturer called Minisel, and I think variants of Minisel control units are used in many cheap washing machines like Beko, Bauknecht, Elin, Whirpool and probably other. Maybe that's why I confused the brands. Ebay ist still full of these units [1].
[1]: https://www.ebay.de/sch/i.html?_nkw=minisel&_sacat=0
Your comment made me curious, so I looked into my old photos. It seems I was mistaken, it's been a few years. It's not a Whirpool but simple a "WM 25E" ("WM" probably for washing machine). Apparently the same model is also branded as "Elin WM 25E".
This forum thread [1] show the exact PCB that burned out in my machine, I've bought the replacement on ebay back then. There was some motorola µc on it and several run of the mill components, but no adhesive or "goo".
[1]: https://elektrotanya.com/content/elin-wm-25e-q2-keresese#
Earlier in my career I was working on components of undersea seismic nodes that were both conformal coated and potted in epoxy. Along the way we realized we were going to have to make a blue wire mod to the PCBs already deployed or loose quite a bit of money. We developed processes to rework these PCBs very effectively, although I can not reveal details. Suffice it to say it was not a fun process, but it was deemed necessary.
Sometimes when all your solutions are bad, you just have to pick the least bad solution. It's still not a good solution, but not solving it is worse. If it is the only available device they know of with the chip they need, they might not have another option.
Not sure if that's a regional thing - I've taken mine apart a few times to repair various things, and the electronics aren't coated in anything (UK)
That's interesting. The Samsung's I've services have had conformal coating on the "mainboard". This is the board that has the relays. The board directly behind the control panel has been without coating, but that was just LED's and some switches.
Must vary from manufacturer to manufacturer - this is a Bosch that's now coming up to about 11 years old, and thankfully still going strong after a temperature sensor and heating element swap a few years ago.
Title is misleading, like other mentioned. My first reaction was: “Wow, what an irony, ASML makes the machines that makes the chips”. Second reaction: “No way ASML machines and washing machines could be powered by the same type of chip”.
I hope this crisis moves industry just an inch towards better “right to fix”. Engineering decisions that make for the serviceable products will help reusability as well
I edited the title, sorry I thought also ASML was doing it since its CEO is claiming it.
> Second reaction: “No way ASML machines and washing machines could be powered by the same type of chip”.
Why would you think that? There are plenty of little generic microcontrollers kicking around in those machines.
And these generic $0.05 microcontrollers have enough power for high precision numeric calculations or high speed signal processing. Maybe not for audiovisual data streams, but you would be surprised how fast even these chips have become.
The OLD machines from ASML (and others) make these chips.
I call at least partial BS on this claim. In the US, you can't sell as "new" anything that has even a single "used" part in it. That's to protect consumers from, say, buying an electronic vehicle only to find that the battery only has one year left of expected lifetime.
So, the rumor certainly isn't true for any mass consumer products, though perhaps if you're making zillion-dollar specialty equipment where each sale is high-touch, you can have the customer acknowledge in writing that the device is being sold as "used", and perhaps even guarantee a replacement for the used part within some amount of time. Of course, if a company wants to use cannibalized washer parts for some internal purpose, that's just fine.
You are kind of comparing apples to oranges. In most cases a used chip will work just as good as new - and probably be proven more reliable as it has been already tested in a working device.
And how do you define "used"? If a module with a chip has been placed in a test harness, is it now used?
> and perhaps even guarantee a replacement for the used part within some amount of time.
It's called a warranty.
The definition of "used" is approximately "delivered to a customer". Doesn't even matter if they returned the box unopened, and got a refund; you still can't sell it as "new".
And, no, I'm not speaking of a "warranty." A warranty means "we'll fix it if anything breaks over a certain time period, perhaps with a refurbished part". That's different than "we'll replace this particular part with a new one as soon as we can, even if it's still working, to make sure you get the entire expected MTBF (as that's typically much longer than the overall warranty for the whole device)"
It's also wrong to think of used chips being as good as new. Yes, you avoid "infant mortality" (though that seems to be less of an issue than it used to be), but how do you know what environment the washing machine was run in? Thermal and power shocks decrease the lifespan, never mind humidity and static electricity. And even if the environment had been perfect, what about electromigration?
That's exactly the reason you can't put used parts into a device sold as new. If you still disagree with this regulation, you're best advised to take it up with the FTC rather than blithely choose to ignore it.
> Doesn't even matter if they returned the box unopened, and got a refund; you still can't sell it as "new".
That simply doesn’t track with reality. If I return a good to Target, unopened, it is being put back on the shelf with no indication that it was ever sold previously.
The statement is pretty vague, so it could be that the chips are destined for some company's assembly line for something like a PLC, rather than in the products themselves.
> In the US, you can't sell as "new" anything that has even a single "used" part in it.
Do you have a source to back up this claim?
"citation needed" is an overused debating point that makes the opponent look better, regardless he's obviously talking about 16 CFR § 20.1 specifically subsection (a).
Note that its trivial to work around. I purchased a bluetooth earpiece on Monday on amazon and its trivial to control-F around looking for the word "new". You will NOT find that word on any marketing. I don't believe any part of it is reused or recycled, however they're not dumb enough to use the word "new" in writing anywhere.
GUIDES FOR THE REBUILT, RECONDITIONED AND OTHER USED AUTOMOBILE PARTS INDUSTRY
So I looked it up and it’s not really universally relevant. This is why people ask for citations…
> "citation needed" is an overused debating point
That looked like a genuine request to me. Besides, some things really are questionable at a surface glance, but generally useful if and only if we know for sure they are factually true and the words used are precisely correct.
"Contains post consumer recycled content because our name brand multinational megacorporation cares about the environment."
If true, that must depend on some specific definition of 'new', since new auto parts are often built on old cores. That's why they give you cash back for the cores.
Maybe there's some fine print somewhere that describes the part as 'remanufactured', but when you ask for a new, say, brake caliper, that's what you'll usually get.
For autoparts they are clearly marked as “reman” or rebuilt or remanufactured or something of the like.
When your supplier decommits on your order, new order lead times are > 52 weeks and the open market price is 2 orders of magnitude higher than buying new, this starts to make some sense. Either you find a way to make product to sell, or you don't sell any product. It's ugly out there right now.
I do the occasional hardware design. I just started a new project and I can't find the parts I need new in stock at distributors. However, I have unused stock, still in antistatic packaging with 1990's vintage date codes. Never thought I'd ever use another DIP part again!
Customer doesn't care: they just want their boards delivered.
So ironic. I always keep the idea of getting parts from disassembly as an example of things that you can do at small scale that aren’t viable at larger scale.
i.e. as a hobbyist you can’t compete with a large manufacturer w.r.t. large orders that get low per unit costs, but you can repurpose old parts cheaper (for your metric for cost) than they can.
That's what many smaller manufacturers have been doing. Tracking down consumer electronics that contains required chips, desoldering, cleaning and then soldering on their devices. It's a manual work, but can be done quickly depending on a chip.
There are some assemblers in China that are doing this too, but pricing is prohibitive for most cases. For instance, a chip that cost $9 before the crisis now costs >$100 + assembly. A toy with the same chip you can get for $5-$15 depending on volume, then it is 10 minute labour to remove the chip, clean it and put it on the target PCB (I do not include the final cleaning time).
If you watch youtube videos about switching power supply teardowns, like "diodegonewild" you'll see that no-name switching power supplies from China generally have fake electrolytic capacitors now a days. If your circuit needs a 400 V 5 uF cap, just desolder and peel off the label on literally "any" capacitor then put a shrink sleeve label saying 400V 5uF and call it good. If it handles 400V that's great for everyone, if it doesn't, then just blame the customer for misuse or make it too hard to return a $2 no-name phone charger. Put a well regarded label on the fake cap, I suspect China ships more caps with ChemiCon labels, than ChemiCon themselves actually manufacture, LOL.
I remember making someone on arduino.cc angry because I pointed out that it was very unlikely that Omron actually made the relays on their $6 relay "shield." Or, if they were genuine Omron relays, probably were pulled off other equipment.
My first employer (early 90's) would buy large lots of "pulls" for a fraction of the price that Arrow, Future or Digi-Key charged for new components. I'm guessing those sources are still available, just not as widely publicized these days.
Relays drop in price with volume much faster than many other parts. I'd believe it if it were 12v "sugar cube" types, which a quick search tells me it probably wasn't.
Is this the first step in getting companies to manage the full lifecycle of their products? I've long believed that companies should be required to take back every product they produce and deal with the waste themselves - they're now motivated to do this, partially at least, due to resource shortages.
That would make life quite difficult for food producers...
Soylent green figured it out
Who else puts shit to use?
Who is "the company" in an economic system of infinite middlemen?
It would be an interesting way to drive a final stake into the heart of brick and mortar retail; if everything is shipped FROM China for nearly free but shipping TO China costs $25/pound then very rapidly the only way to buy anything will be AliExpress.
Remember, "take back" doesn't mean much. Accepts postal delivery? We already have infrastructure for that.
If only there is an OpenWashingMachine repo where one can obtain cycle details an what not, perhaps the DIYers can bring these back to life with arduinos and RPis.
You can just watch the cycles and write it down, it's boring and rather time consuming.
Hoover actually had a model with programmable cycles (you put your custom cycle on Android and upload it via an NFC tag on the washer). What you could set was very limited, but they tried, I guess.
Precautionary approach?: make a video now of your favorite washing machine cycle, analyze later.
To the extent the DIY "community" has the level of talent that it takes to do a 3/4 HP variable frequency drive, which you'd need for the better washers out there even before you got to cycle management, it's doing things like model airplane autopilots and automobile ECUs, which are a lot more fun.
"Anecdote" as in "joke"? Or some guy did it because he could not order the 3 chips he needed for a prototype?
They may be buying something but it's not washing machines.
There are 1-5 logic chips, 1-3 firmware/storage chips and 5-15 transistors for inverter motors in a washer. That's it.
I doubt this is true, because modern electronics are so highly integrated that it would be quite difficult to remove the SMD, or possibly BGA CPU/SOC, and particularly in a washing machine it would be encased in silicone or some other waterproofing.
I'm not sure why more-modular electronics are not more of a thing.
For example, blue-pill STM boards are very cheap, because they are produced in millions. Similarly for many other modules.
How is it cheaper to design and produce a relatively limited run of integrated, custom washing machine control electronics, instead of a simple 'baseboard' and a bunch of really-really-mass-produced modules?
The later modular design would be a boon for legibility, repairability, re-usability, supply-chain resilience, etc, etc.
or... maybe there's so much volume at the top of washing machines (above the water, where the controls are) that you could place the board there, where chips: - don't need waterproofing - don't need to be tightly integrated - can be fully COTS since the logic is relatively dead simple
I've had 2 washing machines die in as many years, and the electronics were encased in silicone.
Of course, a repair involves replacing the entire proprietary electronics assembly (multiple PCBs, and plastic frame), and is just not economical, so the entire machine, valves, motor, steel drum and cabinet, are written-off because a mosfet failed, or whatever.
If the electronics were standardized and modular, even if encased in silicone, there would be an economic case to replace just failed modules.
> blue-pill STM boards
Those are useless for practical application.
64 KB of flash and 20 KB of RAM on a stereotypical STM32F103 (edited to add weasel words: that's what a blue pill is, correct? I don't actually use them.)
Remember these are not PCs where you slap in a bigger SSD or another stick of DRAM.
I have a F767 dev board on my desk. Kind of the same family, 'F' series anyway, and it has 2M flash and I believe 768K of SRAM.
My latest simple application build (built while posting this) ended up 228744 bytes of flash and 142119 of sram.
What kills modern microcontroller storage is every thread has its own fixed size stack so 1K there, 16K there, pretty soon you've got a lot of RAM in use if you go thread-happy, and on the flash side like every civilized embedded device it has MCUboot so 2M sounds like a lot until you partition it into two bootable partitions for OTA upgrades and MCUboot itself takes 64K or 128K or whatever, and there's a big fat (not FAT32 lol) partition for non-volatile config storage. It doesn't matter what RTOS you're using they all seem to be about the same size in the end, FreeRTOS, Mbed, or Zephyr.
Another point worth making is peripherals, I'm pretty sure the F103 doesn't even HAVE the capability to connect ethernet whereas I'm doing OTA upgrades using wired ethernet using the F767.
Note that for decades now, I guess, its been possible to build a washing machine or a lithography machine as an arduino shield or raspi shield, but nobody does that. The part that would not be a boon would be FCC certification, UL certification, and whatever other safety certifications a product requires.
With respect to washing machines as a homeowner I have had to do some repair work on multiple dishwashers and value engineering is the rule, if it corrodes out in five years needing replacement from the point of view of the mfgr that's a "feature" not a bug. So I've never seen a conformally coated washing machine PCB although I'm sure they exist if you don't buy big-box store garbage. Let me remember... Some piece of trash from Sears from 15 years ago used to ship with mosfets having too small of a heatsink and a voltage rating about 5 volts higher than line voltage and an underpowered pump so the user was encouraged to use the water heating mode in operation to keep the water as hot as possible for the anemic pump resulting in the mosfet blowing out every year or so, replaced the PCB under guarantee about three times and tossed that POS. Got a Bosch from horrible depot and that one has a pump that somehow is anemic AND sounds like a screaming jet engine bearing after a year of use, on the third pump now and just ignore the incredible noise. I'm told for eco reasons the new greenwashing dishwashers use 10% less water but don't work at all so you have to run them three times to clean the dishes resulting in 3x the wear and tear (good for mfgrs) and roughly 170% increase in environmental damage over a non-greenwashing dishwasher.
I don't doubt that some washing machine control units are encased in silicone/epoxy, but not all of them are. I've repaired two which were not, although both were very cheap units. You can see original replacement parts on ebay which aren't encased in silicone either [1].
[1]: https://www.ebay.de/sch/i.html?_nkw=minisel&_sacat=0
Because it literally costs money to separate PCB material into separate boards, so there is a minimum cost associated with adding an additional bare board to a design. Which is more than you think.
Connectors also cost money; often more than you'd think. And they add additional points of failure.
Modularity also creates a compatibility matrix you have to track if you're a responsible OEM. I.e. can I use [X,Y,Z] sensor with [Q,R,S] base board and [A,B,C] MCU module and firmware [1,2,3]? In a model that may have shipped with motors [T,U,V]? That's 3^5 combinations right there. Compare that to, say, a single-digit or small two-digit number of actual combinations a manufacturer might ship as revisions over the life cycle of a design. You never have to worry about whether the Q base board will work with the C module in an integrated design.
That $2 blue-pill STM board starts looking expensive really quick compared to the cost of the microcontroller (and maybe the crystals if you really need them) at even modest volumes. It just doesn't cost that much to add a chip or other subcircuit to a PCB design for a real product.
No doubt that is true, although I can imagine that if modules were made in their millions, and soldered (but still replaceable with rework), the cost disparioty would be less, especially with a saving on design/layout cost and the rework and revisions usually involved there.
But the true cost, to the environment, savings due to repairing more modular machines, vs scrapping and manufacturing, shipping, installing, etc whole new machines every few years, could be way less.
What's the advantage of soldering a module in as opposed to soldering a microcontroller? What is the advantage of laying out a new module as opposed to laying out a new integrated board? Why do you think the level of modularity already in an appliance like a washing machine is insufficient?
It's essentially never the microcontroller that fails in something like this, anyway, so you would never repair something by swapping out something like a blue pill dev board. Maybe you would swap in a microcontroller with a different pinout in production that way, to solve a shortage issue, but the development time and costs would be almost identical to just spinning the board. I really don't understand what problem you're trying to solve.
Modularity costs, in a number of ways, and one of them is the material involved. That material will ship in every unit whether it is ever needed or not. When your more modular devices are beyond repair or obsolete or just unwanted all of that material will wind up in the landfill.
Unsoldering a module would be much simpler, if the connection were designed for rework, and modules would be more commoditized.
A simple example is my washing machine that recently died. A mosfet blew on the motor inverter/controller, and obviously took out some other components too. It's silicone-encased, making it infeasible to diagnose and fix compoonent by component. The entire electronics, including psu, mcu, display, buttons, and motor controller are a single unit, and has to be replaced. Since it's specific to the model, it is rare and expensive, and not economical to replace, so the entire machine is now junk, or at best spare parts.
In my fantasy ideal, the motor controller would be a separate board, and fairly standardized to the motor size/design, just like stepper driver boards. The display/ui would be a separate board, since that is a common point of failure. The psu should certainly be a standard board. And the the main control board running the valves etc would again be it's own board. Interfaces and protocols between boards should be standard or at least documented.
Yes, multiple, simpler mcu's. And slightly more material, etc, as you say, though for a washing machine, the added weight of a few electronics hardly matters. But much less custom design, inventory, much more repairable, reusable, upgradeable, hackable, etc.
The washing-machine of Theseus, as it were.
Another example is a toaster oven that recently broke. One of the elements shorted or burned out, it is one of a handful of standard sizes/resistances etc, rather than some custom proprietary design. Nice and modular, just as I want. BUT, the elements are riveted to the rest of the oven, rather than screwed, making a replacement significantly harder, to the point I haven't yet bothered (eg I don't have a metal drill-bit), and I bought a replacement oven (with screwed elements - the search was not trivial). A saving of a couple of cents (riveting vs screwing) for the manufacturer has actually cost me, and the world, much much more. IMHO the repairability of this stuff should be mandated, or at least documented right on the front alongside the energy-efficiency ratings and purchase price, etc.
I doubt very much that the blue pill/black pill boards are produced in anything close to the volume of most consumer products like washing machines.
Those "maker" boards are dirt cheap because (a) the builders can use gray-market parts, including "pulls" (b) there is nothing on the board that isn't absolutely necessary: even the PCB itself tends to be 0.031" FR4 instead of the more robust 0.062" to save money. I've seen some boards in the Arduino ecosystem that clearly used punched holes to save money over drilling.
When you're building tens or hundreds of thousands of something, using a baseboard and daughterboard architecture is going to be far more expensive than putting everything on one board. Hell, I'd go so far to say that if you're building more than 500/year it's not worth it.
I feel that we don't know the full picture of the chip shortage. Is the demand actually up that much, and why? Or is there someone secretly buying a huge number of chips (military, secret crypto mining)?
Do note that a lot of the chip shortage is also due to hoarders who scalp them.
Even my local german newspaper decided to publish an article debunking this claim because it keeps popping up again and again.
Here is the whole transcript of the ASML earnings call: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4502395-asml-holding-n-v-as...
And the whole quote in context:
Peter Wennink
Well, I'm with the company 23 years, and I've always tried to read the minds of the investors, and I always got it wrong. So don't ask me that question. So, no, it's a place that can only read the minds, not only read the minds, but talk with our customers and see where we are today.
And the issue is, and I tried to mention this before is that, the demand that we're currently seeing comes from so many places in the industry. Technology-wise, market-wise, geography-wise, it's so widespread that we have significantly underestimated, let's say, the width of the demand. And I think that I don't think is going to go away.
And it just -- it's an anecdote, but I met a very large -- the executive of very large industrial company, a conglomerate, last week. And actually, they told me that they're buying washing machines to rip out the semiconductors to put them in industrial modules. I mean, that's happening these days.
Now, you could say, that’s an anecdote. But, to be honest, it happens everywhere. It is -- like I said, it is 15, 20, 25-year old semiconductor technology that is now being used everywhere. It's got -- it's all driven by IoT type applications.
AskHN: Are old-school 1980s/70s discrete and integrated components in demand? I know of a pack-rat with a lot of that-era componentry. Where do people look for sales of private electronics/controllers DIY/learn-it-yourself parts and pieces?
I wish!!
I have drawers full of that crap.
From the article:
>Anyone who has tried to buy a car or home appliance lately knows the chip shortage is still pretty bad.
Are people building some cheap washing machines without chips in them? That might be harder for cars to get away with, but come on, washing machines?
Maybe there are people buying them and parting them out.
I talked to a used washing machine purchaser who quoted what my washing machine that was used for 2-3 years would be worth. (spoiler alert: not much at all, you're better off buying used) He told me to check out how unreliable Whirlpool washers are, check it out: https://www.designnews.com/corrosion-outbreak-whirlpool-mach...
Building "washing machines without chips in them" would be more complex, costly, and time-consuming.
Washing machines without chips existed 60 years ago. Chips are a number of advantages, but mechanical timer washing machines can still be found in operation. (I'm not sure if they are still made, I suspect yes)
The people that could build mechanical clocks are probably long dead by now, we would need archaeologists to find their fossilized remains. Maybe they left some note somewhere.
We'd just be having a gear shortage or something.
The people who can build mechanical clocks are either working on other things or making high-end wristwatches. There are still people inventing new watch movements.
Yes they are still made. Speed Queen sells them in the US although they try to encourage customers to buy ones with electronic controls and offer a longer warranty on them.
We just gave up a machine from the 1950s. The installer for the new machine looked in amazement that the old unit had still been working until recently (a Kenmore).
Looking to legislate parts availability for ca 5 years is a step, but IMHO it isn't nearly enough for the long run.
Indeed, I still use one. The timer contacts need cleaning once in a very long time (depending on usage) but it's been quite reliable and if something breaks I can probably make or find a replacement relatively easily.
Before chips there were delicate mechanical contraptions in washmachines to drive washing cycles. They weren't cheap either.
The ticking was rather pleasant to the ear
Crank washers coming soon. Very energy efficient, environmentally friendly, fully custom cycles.
simple timers are not eco and not greenwash.
Its actually just as bad as cars.
Fit for purpose is no longer a requirement for sales, but uses less water or uses less electricity is a requirement for sales.
Companies, but not ASML (I read this as customers of customers of ASML)
> that large industrial companies are buying washing machines in order to rip out the chips and repurpose them, according to ASML CEO Peter Wennink.
I would not be too surprised if the original source of the (probably partiallly tongue-in-cheek) claim was some supplier of ASML (who obviously at the same time is customer of ASML's customers).
And in the process of doing it they are increasing the prices of the washing machines because customers who need them can not get them.
That'll be good for the environment.
=^/
Title is incorrect, the article merely quotes an ASML executive who claims other industries are doing this instead.
The relevant part being: "But it has become so dire that large industrial companies are buying washing machines in order to rip out the chips and repurpose them, according to ASML CEO Peter Wennink."
Title edited, thanks!
I sold my surplus STM32 reels at 12x of the original price a year ago.