In our past purchases of washers and dryers, “go with each other” meant their appearance was compatible. That's still true today, but there's more: the washer and dryer are connected by an Ethernet cable, and the washer tells the dryer what's coming next – including how much water is in the clothing. How does the washer know that? It weighs the clothing before washing and after, and the difference is the water content. It also tells the dryer what the dry weight of the clothes were, and the dryer watches that to know when its close to being finished. It also senses the exhaust humidity (which is the only thing older dryers did) to know exactly when all the water is gone.
The washer (a top-loading model) has us ready to believe in magic. The first thing we noticed is that there is no agitator in the middle, as every other washer we've ever owned has had. That agitator seems key to getting the clothes clean, but somehow (here's the magic!) this washer gets the clothes nice and clean without one. That's not the best part, though. With this washer, we can throw the clothes into the tub without taking any care to balance them. The washer somehow compensates for this, so that when it starts spinning, the tub remains balanced. Magic! This morning I deliberately loaded the tub all on one side, and even with that the tub spun smoothly, without the washer trying to walk across the floor. There must be a counterweight that moves to offset the load's imbalance, though if there is it is completely hidden. We can watch the tub turn slowly after we load it, and we can see the imbalance in the beginning of its cycle – but within a few seconds, it's “zeroed out” and spinning as if completely in balance.
Both machines are being run by an embedded computer, of course. With a few sensors and actuators, these computers are solving problems that have plagued washers and dryers forever. Even though I have a pretty good idea how these things are working, it still feels like magic to use it...
I as well got one of them fancy low water setups but no where near the level that your rigs are at, quite awesome. But my main question is whats the over/under on how long it is before you have plugged them into your home network and you are reconfiguring for "Dilatush optimization"
ReplyDeleteHah! While I was installing it, I started thinking about putting a hub on there and sniffing the lines to see what the traffic was. Most likely, it wouldn't be hard to reverse-engineer the packets. But it occurred to me that it might not actually be Ethernet - could be, for example, a serial connection that just happens to use an Ethernet cable (cheap, easy to buy). Before I plug it into a hub, I'll have to figure that out...
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