this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
681 points (87.4% liked)
Technology
59641 readers
2611 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If smart options were actually smart you could do that.
With the right devices I’m certain this can be done with HomeAssistant, but everyone who makes these appliances wants to wall you into their cloud ecosystem and harvest your activity data.
Yeah, technologically, it's not only possible but even simple. It would come down to the washer knowing how much water it needs for a cycle and the softener knowing how much soft water it can provide, a means of getting that information from each of them, and then an if statement with a > check and a way to tell the softener to cycle and washer to start.
I wonder when an appliance hacking community is going to rise up. I know that all that information is available to my water softener controller because I use it to manually check that before running the laundry or dishwasher. So a custom controller could add network capabilities. Then just give it an API so it can be queried and directed and the actual smart software can exist entirely on the server.
Kinda makes me want to buy an extra softener to hack and see if it's as easy as I suspect it might be, but don't want to try it with my only one because I also suspect I'm wrong lol.