Companies Rumored To Harvest Washing Machines For ICs
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Companies Rumored To Harvest Washing Machines For ICs
Companies Rumored To Harvest Washing Machines For ICs
Wired and SCMP are reporting on interesting trivia from the realm of chip shortages. Apparently, some large conglomerate out there is buying new washing machines and scavenging the chips they can’t obtain otherwise. My imagination pictures skilled engineers in a production room, heavy-duty electric screwdrivers and desoldering toolkits on the floor next to them, and a half-torn-down washing machine about to reveal its control board with an STM32 right in the middle. This might not be the most skilled job, but it’s a change of pace, and hey, as long as the rate stays the same?
Whichever company is doing this, they’re in a conundrum for sure. One of the articles offers an example of a $350,000 spectrometer manufacturing being stalled by lack of a $0.50 part – while this feels exaggerated, it’s within the realm of possibility. For car manufacturers, the difference isn’t as dire, but still severe enough, and not meeting the production targets has ramifications other than the financial ones. It might indeed make sense to buy a $150 washing machine in order to finally be able to move a $30,000 car off the assembly line.
Shipping Anyway – Barely
There’s always high hopes about solving IC shortage problems. Chips appear and disappear, toolkits get made, cool new substitute parts get found. However, if you’re managing a company’s production process, at some point you’ll have to break out of the limbo between “this might be over tomorrow” and “we aren’t doing enough yet”. You either reach for desperate measures, or you might find yourself out of business.
You’d think the situation would’ve gotten sorted out by now – it did start almost two years ago already, after all! Of course, there’s always new complications piling on. The war being waged on Ukraine by Russia has interrupted some supply chains, making select products more expensive. There’s periodic COVID-19 lockdowns in China, an earthquake has brought some Japanese factories to a halt in March, and TSMC’s capacity is sold out through 2023 too – not leaving much hope for those not lucky enough to be in the schedule.
The Opposite Of Recycling
This situation reminds me of last year’s Remoticon presentation, by [Maurits Fennits] from [Unbinare] – creating a toolkit for reverse-engineering in order to be able to reuse parts, except without the benefit of being able to obtain proprietary information through business relationships. Unbinare’s toolkit is impressive and I hope that at least some of the tools are being put to good use when it comes to chip shortage problem solutions.
On the other hand, tearing apart brand new equipment for a single chip creates more e-waste, even when it makes financial sense. We can’t realistically expect that the company in question is going to restore these washing machines back to working condition and release them back into the market; the whole disassembly and desoldering operation is probably quite destructive, too.
Surely, the washing machine thing can’t be common occurrence, and there’s no indication that it’s anything but an isolated incident. However, if such methods are used, I’d hope they at least cause some reflection. One would dream that Apple, for instance, is being forced to face its affinity towards shredding the devices they’re meant to recycle – as opposed to actually meaningful forms of recycling. I’m afraid this isn’t about to happen.
We’ve torn down many a prototype in the past year or two, from STM32- to Raspberry Pi-containing ones. Do tell us about your own “salvaging parts to bring new projects to life” journeys of recent times!
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124 thoughts on “Companies Rumored To Harvest Washing Machines For ICs”
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Val says:
Is this like… an engineering urban myth? I’ve been hearing this thrown around in my company and never expected to see it on hackaday. Does anyone have actual names or sources? I had been looking into it and couldn’t find anything definite
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Arsenijs Picugins says:
yeahhh, could be.. quoting Wired:
In some cases, this means taking desperate measures. Last month, Peter Wennink, CEO of the Dutch company ASML, which makes the complex machines needed to mint cutting-edge computer chips, revealed another eye-opening example. Wennink says one large industrial conglomerate had resorted to buying washing machines just to scavenge the chips inside them for its products.
and SCMP:
A major industrial conglomerate has resorted to buying washing machines and tearing out the semiconductors inside for use in its own chip modules, according to the CEO of a company central to the chipmaking supply chain. ASML Holding’s Chief Executive Officer Peter Wennink remarked on the situation, without naming the conglomerate, during his company’s earnings call Wednesday.
It could be a myth; I doubt that the company in question would be named, either way. It’d be very cool to know specifics – not even the company name. I didn’t go looking for them, that wasn’t the purpose of my article, would be cool if it turned out to be findable though!
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Val says:
To me the red flag is that I heard this story about 6 months ago from a coworker, so now that I see it on multiple sites retold the same way… starting to think it’s just a fun story going around in the hardware designer circles.
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abjq says:
So that’s the spin you’re putting on this story – you see it rinse, and repeat?
That red flag will spoil your whites, by the way….-
Val says:
I just had a stroke reading that
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Percy says:
Brilliant! A cold pint for you sir !
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James says:
I’m sure there is some truth to this but I thought the same thing as you. This story has been going around for a long time. Something about it stinks.
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a Jaded Hobo says:
Near where ASML is building their lithography machines there is a company that makes electron microscopes (it used to be called FEI). These products fit the price named in the story.
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Todd Israels says:
I can believe chips being harvested. The large amount of leftover scrap from a washing machine makes it more questionable source.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
I thought it first came up as an explanation as to why Russians were looting Ukraine of domestic appliances… to build drones with washing machine brains.
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Lewis says:
Do you mean brainwashed drones?
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Ewald says:
Apparently it was an anecdotal remark from ASML’s ceo Peter Wennink on April 20 2022 at the presentation of the company’s Q1 financial results. A couple of Dutch news sites picked it up an it seemed to have trickled down to other sites.
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chagrinnish says:
I think what you’re seeing is someone just weighing the cost of salvaging a chip from a washing machine vs. re-engineering a circuit using a similar chip. If you only need a few units it would make sense to salvage, then you’d consider contacting the washer manufacturer to buy their stock of chips, then you’d take the most costly option and spend the money to re-engineer.
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dudenamedben says:
no need to engineer anything. simply look in the archives. i have a dishwasher that has no ic’s. i have had washing machines in the past, no ic’s, same with refrigerators, ovens, toaster ovens, coffee makers, the list is endless. we can literally do the same with MOST of the consumer bs we buy. save the chips for the devices that are mission critical and actually require compute functionality. and no, a car does not need some proprietary bs nav system, or cell data tracking, 9 billion sensors… the thing just needs to get you from point a to point b. and if ya really wanna get to the nitty gritty, we dont need automated headlights, digital blinkers, rain sensors, none of it. people seem to forget that they are the operator of whatever machine they own. we can go back to manual transmissions and reduce computational needs and increase ACTUAL gas mileage at the same time. why do we have digital gauges? not required and inaccurate. tire pressure sensors… those are called EYEBALLS or a thumb.. or better yet ana analog pressure gauge.
people got lazy and stupid, this is why chip shortage, cuz they’d rather pay double and wait 3 or 4 years than actually have a working car that they might have to actually put 5 minutes worth of maintenance into. YOUR CAR IS NOT A ROLLING THEATER, BOOM BOX, OR DINING ROOM! its just a car. buy it like one and drive it like one, gadgets on cars are stupid and they ruin the car in short order. waste of time and money. if someone wants a fancy screen, just leave a blank hole like they used to. jam wtf you want in it AFTERMARKET. its better anyway.
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shinsukke says:
Absolutely no way
The any large manufacturing based company would rather stop making products than use salvaged ICs from random junk.
The reliability of such salvaged components would be an unknown factor, and I don’t think any company would like to risk their reputation-
GeekOfAllThings says:
I don’t have any sources so I could be wrong, but what I heard was that it was a supplier used this method to find replacement chips for their clients. Supposedly, the manufacturers weren’t even aware.
Then again, who knows if there is any truth to these rumors. I never treat stories like these as fact unless there are some sources.
It’s extremely wasteful if it is true.-
MLA says:
There are some situations where putting an used chip in a device is way better than not delivering the device at all. Like, say life saving machines which are in short supply during the pandemic.
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DKE says:
That specific example is a _definite_ no.
Not delivering such a device because of supply chain issues and somebody dies – that sucks.
Delivering a life saving machine without rock solid provenance and somebody dies – you get sued into oblivion.-
Drone says:
If you understand how reliability works, there’s a thing called the “bathtub” curve.[1] Early on manufacturing issues result in many failures then eventually things settle down and you get a long run with few failures. Eventually wear from use causes failures to increase until the number of failures is unacceptable, that’s when the product or device has reached end-of-life and the bathtub shaped curve is complete. Sometimes to avoid high initial failures reaching customers, a part or product undergoes a period of “burn-in” testing [2] before it ships. In a sense, taking a working part out of a known good product yields a more reliable part because it has undergone a defacto burn-in period in the field.
1. Bathtub Curve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
2. Burn-In
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PPJ says:
@ MLA
Yet there were many respirators with one element broken only and manufacturers decided not to support this kind of practice (there was article on HAD about connector allowing parts to cooperate between two different respirators).@ Drone
Do they have some procedure for initial “burn in”? There is a difference between “plug it here for month and run on 30% – 60% of load and monitor output” and “this was running full power god knows how long under which condition- should be ok”.
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come2 says:
While I do think it’s unprobable (except maybe in China) because the man-hours needed may not be worth it, we’re no longer in the 80s, the average IC taken from a fairly new product works probably very well. Besides, nothing exempts them in any case from testing the salvaged ICs before putting them in other devices.
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MLA says:
Things changed very quickly in the last months. A 35$ FPGA is now worth 8000$ because of shortages. Its definitely worth recycling if you have for example some older revision board with the chip lying around.
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Gregg Eshelman says:
I assume they’d be buying newly manufactured machines at retail, so the chips wouldn’t be used. Chips, and subassemblies, removed from new equipment have long been a pretty large part of the surplus market. A company purchasing products at retail to remove components is just skipping the wait for the products to be sold off cheap after they’re discontinued.
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BrendaE says:
Almost every other kind of chip is present–except for small SOC/Microcrontollers. Worried? I am. Everyone is probably hording them for military weapons. Or, China is just making sure the West doesn’t have any. You can by motherboards, processors, memory–and every other chip on a computer motherboard. The only other chip I saw missing, so far is a magnatometer, which doesn’t dispel my theory.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
Lowest profit product gets bumped off the bottom of the ladder when foundry capacity in high demand. So someone somewhere gotta learn, can’t sell the high end stuff without the support chips.
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LAK says:
“[P]robably hording [small SOC/Microcrontollers] for military weapons” is baseless. There are very few Military programs that are even allowed to use COTS parts. And even if they do, very few companies will spend capital on stocking COTS parts and military programs procure only need plus attrition. Why? When a program ends, the parts bought on the contract must either be given to the customer that paid for them, must be scrapped or must be purchased back by the contractor. It is also possible that the customer will PAY for storage of their parts at a contractors site. Parts in non-program stores are costing the company money, not making money for it (except in the latter case above). Getting management to approve that capital expenditure is not likely, and programs that allow wholesale use COTS parts are far to small to be able to afford long term contractor storage costs. I have worked many of these programs using COTS and I have never seen COTS parts hoarding, at least where I worked, after the program ends. Parts are legally consumed per contract, scrapped, or sold to another program. That’s per standard government contract requirements (FAR/DFAR).
More likely than not, commercial electronics manufacturers are hit by two things. One is the real loss of labor during Covid, and the other is the fact that manufactured piece parts are sold for such low margins, it is no longer profitable to make them; at least not in regular production. This was the topic of an article I read several years ago regarding chip resistors. Pre-Covid I warned my programs of pending parts availability issues (primarily because of potential counterfeiting threats). Now lead times for M55342 resistors are OVER 52 weeks. It takes one year for a chip resistor? There is no hoarding; there are just no parts to hoard.
As for China making sure the west does not have parts? Well of course. We will get parts when it benefits the CCP.
And China is the champion of “recycling” parts. Just google “Tom Sharpe and SMT Corporation” if there are any doubts.
When China takes Taiwan back militarily, and the US puts the kibosh on Chinese trade like what was done with Russian Vodka, gas and oil during the continuing Ukrainian war, just how bad do you think it will be?
I doubt anyone can fully comprehend the impact on our economy and our availability of parts and products when that happens. Try buying a Raspberry Pi 4 today. Two years ago I could get one delivered the next day for about $61. Now, not for less than about $140 on Amazon (that’s not inflation; its supply and demand – ECON 101).
With a Chinese trade embargo? Ha! Good luck. We produce almost no components or assemblies in the US anymore, and many of the parts we do still produce here are likely destined for military programs anyway – rarely, if ever, does a military program allow the use of foreign sourced parts – for reasons that should be obvious now.
Taking Chinese products out of the worlds supply chain will be as bad as eliminating the petrochemical (“fossil-fuel”) industry. Very few people comprehend the entirety of products in both supply chains. I can’t get a Raspberry Pi next day today. What about getting WD-40 after the petrochemical industry is shut down? What about getting ANYTHING during a Chinese trade embargo?
Who needs to bomb the US back to the stone age when all that needs to be done is cut US trade ties with China. And don’t think the Chinese did not plan it that way. They’ll get Taiwan back and we can’t do beans about it, unless we are willing to live in a cave.
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Foldi-One says:
An interesting take, with some truth to it, the USA (as well as every nationality reading this site) has some dependence on others, but that includes China – its a global economy of many facets but everyone participating is at least effected by if not entirely dependent on the production of the other nations for somethings.
So yes an embargo on China would hurt, but it would hurt them too – potentially more than they can take in much shorter order, as China is a much less evenly developed and productive nation and largely doesn’t invent or engineer what it makes (yes they will have some very talented and well educated people that do those job, as they are not a real backwater from the 16th century, but they don’t have enough of them to meet the needs of their very large and often rather underdeveloped population), they also as far as I can tell are rather dependent on the outside world for other very basic but important commodities including food…
So who comes off worse? Very hard to categorically predict – for one thing it matters hugely how the rest of the world reacts – do they pick sides? its a global economy..
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Ostracus says:
Globalization as an instrument of war.
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Miroslav says:
People used to hard times adapt much more easily than people used to good times.
Just look at the West right now. Everyone is crying bl00dy mVrder even though things are quite good compared to some 2nd or 3rd world countries.
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HaHa says:
Not everyone.
Protests are heavy on people with time on their hands, why protesters trend ‘hard moron adult children’.
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Foldi-One says:
> People used to hard times adapt much more easily than people used to good times.
Again interesting and somewhat valid, folks used to being more self-reliant (or reliant on the local areas community) are much more likely to think of and accept bizzare bodged solutions so life goes on well enough… But also easy to find the counters – folks that have been barely scraping by have nowhere left to go when the REALLY hard times hit. For instance there is nothing some isolated minnow nation/town/subsistence farming family can do to help themselves when a prolonged drought comes along – its too much for the already stretched supplies they have access to – its get external help or die.
Where those that have a great deal might be entitled little whiny shits about the inconvenience of loosing x, but they still can go about their lives barely effected in many cases as the society they are part of has the capacity to cope.
So yeah ‘Everyone is crying bl00dy mVrder’ may be true, but at the same time if they have all the free time and energy to make such a song and dance life clearly isn’t that bad for them… Like the railway unions in the UK, striking while getting so many perks and paid better than many very highly skilled (and massively in debt from their education) folks, but they can walk out for not being offered ENOUGH* extra pay and no certainty their jobs won’t eventually change with automation – sure its not all rosy, there may well be some genuine and fair grievances in there, but damn do they have it good compared to many folks that can’t strike…
*that is for me the most insulting bit, already paid rather damn well, lots of folks aren’t getting payrises at all and they have the balls to bitch about not ending up effectively wealthier right now despite the mess Russia has made on top of the barely started pandemic recovery…
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Stephen M. Woods says:
While largely agreeing with many of your postulates, many of your assertions regarding DoD programs are inaccurate. Over my 30 year Aerospace/Defense career as a customer QRA rep, Sr. Test/Systems/R&D Engineer, retiring as a Program Manager, I’ve managed, facilitated and, engineered a very broad spectrum of FAA and DoD programs. Having worked closely with FAA DER’s and DoD QAR’s I am very familiar with Mil-STD/Spec and DO’s.
In 1996, in response to the public outcry over DoD spending, Admiral Perry relaxed materials procurement requirements to allow for “qualified” COTS components. We were approved to accept for use CoC’s on fit/form/function components and materials which met contractual operating and performance parameters. “Qualified” meaning initial lot qualifying acceptance testing. Followed by stepped reductions in testing volume and frequency according to statistical analysis, such as Six Sigma. The rational being the biggest factor in component and material cost was in the outdated Mil requirements for quality testing. Such as 100% lot testing of hammers and toilet seats requiring 3000 blows with minimal loss in function for acceptance.
Next is foreign content. All of the programs I managed or contributed to had minimum foreign and small and/or disadvantaged business content requirements. Typically 20%, possibly more if also designated for foreign military sales.Excess procured and/or customer owned material and components historically were either designated as spares and transferred to the DLA or, abandoned in place by DoD authority.
Beginning in the early 2000’s, DoD initiated resident OEM Organic Depot repair/maintenance/spares program contracts. Where excess and newly procured high value and expendable materials and components are securely warehoused to support contracted requirements. I managed one of the first of these at Northrup Grumman Electro-Optics Systems ANPVS-12 day/night Sniper Scopes.
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HaHa says:
Pooh bear cant risk anything but a sure thing. He’s hanging by a thread as is.
Taiwan has known for decades that the USA is an unreliable protector (it depends on which party is in the WH). So they are ready as F.
If their rebel mainland Chinese provinces attack: First the fabs are wrecked, second everybody who knows how to run a fab is on an airplane going east, third the mainland navy is sunk near Kinmen island, forth the mainland air force is shot down over Kinmen, fifth Beijing gets a conventional explosive ballistic missile ‘surprise’ square in the CCP headquarters, sixth mainland’s electric grid goes down for unexplained reasons.
In the end, pooh bears replacement might get a smoking crater where Taiwan was (to match the craters where Beijing, Shanghai etc were). He will be too busy avoiding being strung up from street lamps to notice.
Also: South Korea takes the opportunity to wipe best Korea off the map. Yes they’ve got a lot of artillery pointed at Seoul. In exactly the spots they’ve been for decades. One shot per emplacement and they’re gone, it’s not 1960. Nukes will be destroyed on ground. Liquid fueled missiles are not quick shots.
The mainland expects to eventually get Taiwan the same way the got HK. They are wrong. But they know they can’t ‘win’ a military conflict.
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Foldi-One says:
> The mainland expects to eventually get Taiwan the same way the got HK.
That to me as UK citizen is the most irritating part only a short time ago the people of HK were ‘ours’, we didn’t actually have to give the island back*, only the leased territories and all those people were our collective responsibility, yet with all the crap going on no there is practically no media coverage here and nobody is even saying ‘Hey now Pooh that ain’t cricket, play by the rules as agreed or we will get very cross…’ as ineffective as such mild complaints would be.. Seems to me more is being done to help the Ukrainians (not that I object to the help provided) than folks we have some really recent responsibility for as many of them are old enough to have been our people, and their kids are more like us in many cultural ways too.
*though the cost of holding it if China wanted to fight over it means it makes sense to hand it back with the right assurances, the age of empire building and colonialism is supposed to be over and with the hope that the concepts of personal freedoms etc will be allowed to flow and China will evolve – which for a while it did seem to be…
> Pooh bear cant risk anything but a sure thing.
Not sure that is true anymore, his buddy that sounds like the Canadian’s favourite food has made enough of a mess to upset the established order, and done it really oh so well, without, yet anyway being held to account for the stupidity at home. And as nobody wants to risk armegeddon of the self inflicted radioactive kind, he is getting away with brutality, what amounts to blackmail, murder, complete disregard of his own promises, etc for the great cost of bugger all (to himself personally) from abroad…-
dudenamedben says:
you can say “bugger all” but you can’t say “f**k all”… cultural bias is even here on hack a day…
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Foldi-One says:
Oh I can say both, but one is far more me than the other.
Can say F** you too dudenamedben if you either deserve it or desire and ask nicely…While there is doubtless some elements of cultural bias that defines the phrasing I’d choose I am perfectly happy, as are most folk, to throw that bias out when it suits – I mean who but the English and their former colonies talks about cricket! That is a dead giveaway there, for Americans its all Rounders, opps no sorry Rounders but for Men, so it needs a new name or ‘Football’ that has very little to do with feet…
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DougM says:
On my current project I had to re-design a PCB twice – once to replace a part that was no longer available, again when the only part I could get was a 3v3 part where the original was 5V (fortunately the footprint was the same, so I just added some 0R spots for selection)
Historically for home projects I’ve always bought more components than I needed, in the form of buying the first discount quantity (usually 10) so I’ve got a ton of chips around. I used to think that this was a stupid waste of money and time because I could always get more chips but ironically my gamble has paid off and my projects are continuing.
I’m surprised there’s not a chip arbitrage site out there, though. Aside from the ransom sites there ought to be something where a person or a company can put out a request for a particular chip and if someone has extra they can offer them up. I bet a lot of people have a handful of those STM32 chips.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
Well there’s always markets they can offer their surplus on. But they don’t see their 50,000 stock of one chip that is useless without another chip as surplus, until maybe they find another chip pair to sub, but they’re gonna hold onto them as stock.
Therefore, what is needed is a barter trading system, where they can trade 25k of the one chip they’re holding for 25k of the chip they need, because someone was sitting on 50k of the other chip which they also weren’t letting go of. Then both of them can make 25k gizmos. i.e. a conditional swap system, I’ve got x if you’ve got y, rather than, yah money is nice, but I can’t do crap with it when there’s no replacement chips.
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sjm4306 says:
… so we basically need to make the Tinder of electronics components bartering apps. Swipe right to hook up with another manufacturer and exchange surplus components …
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iHally says:
Every time I read about the chip shortage i feel a wave of guilt as I look over at my oversized container. Full of, parts and, chips for projects I have yet to start over the years.
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Steven-X says:
It takes quite a bit of skill to remove a chip from a PCB and have it in a condition to use it in another board. In the past I repaired a friends C64’s by stealing a 40-pin DIP off one donor board and soldering it to another. I can’t imagine doing that with the SMDs that populate modern boards.
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Val says:
Most fabs that offer manual soldering will do that for you, you can send you 10k boards and get one components swapped for another, and other wild stuff like this, it’s “pretty common” (YMMV).
Well actually it’s pretty common now with our shortage, I have had products where we sent them to a soldering fab to swap ICs and such.
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BobH says:
I can’t speak about BGA parts, but the SMD parts that I have worked with are easier to pull than the through hole parts. Less likely to damage the PCB and the heat to de-solder does not need to be applied to the chip for as long a time.
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localroger says:
If you have an air rework station you can melt the solder on all the pins of a SMD IC and just pick it up with tweezers. There are also contact soldering iron tips that will do that for smaller thru-hole IC’s but pulling a 40 pin without destroying either it or the board is a real hassle. If you don’t care about destroying the donor board you can cut the bad IC off the repair board one pin at a time, pull the pins and clean the holes individually, then take the replacement IC (and all the other chips LOL) off the donor board by fanning a propane torch across the back and tapping it.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
Yah, large boards, I just chop into small pieces around the ICs and then take them off, avoids a lot of problems with groundplanes sinking all the heat.
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a Jaded Hobo says:
Additionally there are low temperature solders that can be applied to a chip first to lower the total melting point and thus reducing the stress.
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jenningsthecat says:
Actually, given the right tools I’d rather remove SMT chips than DIP packages. I’ve done both, and I find surface mount parts both easier to remove and easier on the PCB they’re being removed from. My only caveat is SMT parts that are glued in place – they’re really troublesome. BTW, if anyone has any tips or tricks for removing parts that are held in place with more than just solder, I’d be happy to hear them.
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Cogidubnus Rex says:
You can get soldering tips which match the IC footprint, so all pins get heated equally, then just shift it once the solder’s melted. The poor mans version is to cut a length of copper that wraps around the chip for a similar effect. Hot air stations work too. It’s hardly rocket science with the right tools & experience, without those it’s a little more exciting.
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Bill Gates says:
I am happy to have some of the dumbest appliances ever. My washing machine uses mechanical timers. Easy to fix, easy to make a replacement, no chips, no firmware, no tracking.
My dryer also uses mechanical timers. No sensors, no chips, no firmware, no tracking.
My AC uses mechanical valves, the thermostat uses a chip, but I can make a replacement with an Arduino in a pinch.
My stove uses mechanical dials for temperature, no firmware, no chips, no tracking.
my lightbulbs, while LED, use electro-mechanical dimmers. No firmware, no tracking.
I don’t subscribe to anything that lets me dim my bulbs, turn on my oven, notify me of dryer status, washer status, etc.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
I love oldskool washers and dryers, throw a $10 belt on once a decade, bearing every couple… just keep on keeping on.
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Bill says:
I had a hand-me-down washer/dryer pair from my parents which I kept going for almost 30 years. Eventually the washer started to fall apart as the plastic and rubber parts became brittle. I finally got tired of making kludge parts, gave in, and bought a washer/dryer pair insanely cheap on a Sears Black Friday sale about a decade ago. I give props to Whirlpool (in this case labeled Kenmore) for doing a great job of engineering, taking out what isn’t needed and maximizing reliability. The controller board and mechanical drive are common to an amazing number of top loader washers of various brands and incorporates very clever on board diagnostic and calibration capability. The most significant improvement is that the heavy agitator transmission has been replaced with a simple toothed belt drive reversible motor and simple speed change gear for the spin cycle. The Kenmore dryer design looks largely unchanged since maybe the late 1960s. The dryer timer is still electromechanical.
I’d be kind of surprised to find any company would be purchasing washing machines to cannibalize for electronic parts. It looks like a lot of the stuff on the controller board is heavily customized and purpose made for the application. I don’t think there is a handy STM32 which can be just popped off and plopped into some other device.
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Dan says:
I want a good old toaster with a clockwork timer.
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Val says:
Honestly I’m quite fond of my high-end dryer, it detects when the laundry is actually dry, so there’s not timer, it saves quite a bit of energy which means a lot these days, especially with how powerhungry these things are.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
I take that it is less than 2 years old and you haven’t had a $1000 for a new control board incident yet.
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localroger says:
My washing machine is about ten years old, has the same features as Val’s, and has yet to have a service problem. I would not expect a control board to be $1000 because the entire washer was only $400.
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Cogidubnus Rex says:
You’re forgetting economics. More money to be made in flogging a whole new machine than offering a control board at a small profit. Make the control boards available sure, but when they’re priced similar/more than a new machine… Not all manufacturers are the same though.
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Bill says:
My approximately ten year old Kenmore dryer has an electromechanical timer whose advance rate is controlled by a pair of metal strips and simple amplifier. I suspect the design hasn’t changed much if any since the late 1960s. It is very effective at drying clothes the right amount and not wasting energy. Whirlpool has had 50+ years to refine the design and make it drop dead reliable.
The same goes for refrigerator defrost timers. I had to replace one for a friend about a year ago. The replacement timer was designed to work in a variety of refrigerators going back to the 1960s. There is a pretty clever feedback mechanism with a klix-on switch on the evaporator coil which halts the timer motor while the heater is on until the fridge is defrosted just enough. It is clever, super simple, and works for decades. … just what engineering should be.
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HaHa says:
The only washer/dryers still sold with electromechanical timers are ‘speed queens’ and are very high end.
Anything cheep has a junky computer controller and is deep in planned obsolescence.
Kenmore never made anything. Sears just rebranded stuff. You sure it’s not more then 10 years old? 10 years ago Sears was already dead store walking.
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NiHaoMike says:
They should tighten efficiency requirements so that electric dryers would need to use heat pumps or thermal recovery heat exchangers. Just that would likely save a lot more than “smart” energy saving algorithms.
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Ostracus says:
Or just pipe into the room, with a filter on the end. No sense making things more complicated than needed (efficiency washers, etc).
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Lewis says:
Yeah, you could just pipe the dryer exhaust into a room, until black mold started growing on everything. Or until mushrooms grow from the woodwork; been there, done that with a Vicks vaporizer.
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Ostracus says:
This videos for you then.
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Varga Tom says:
Finally people will start buying used stuff because stores will be empty.
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Fred says:
From the world of plumbing, I have a similar tale.
I bought a shower faucet from Costco that developed a leaky valve. The brand was Waterpik, a brand normally dealing in shower heads, but not traditionally the faucet hardware itself. It was on sale and I was renovating.
The faucet had developed a leak and needed a valve replacement. Unfortunately for me, Waterpik has since left the faucet business, and parts for this particular valve body were impossible to source. This brings up a pet peeve I have with the entire faucet industry: please, would one of the major manufacturers standardize on a set of parts for their lines? Every faucet has a different cartridge! There’s hundreds, dare I say THOUSANDS of designs for valve cartridges. WHY? Nevermind, I know why.
So I have a leaky shower faucet. There’s effectively no access to this install, it’s behind tile and I can’t get at it from any other side. I do not want to tear this out and replace the faucet. I want to replace the easily replaceable impossible to find faucet cartridge.
The solution was, as for many things, eBay. Someone had grabbed a bunch of these faucets 15 years ago on closeout, and was still selling them! Pop the new cartridge in, happy as a clam.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
I made that decision a decade or so back, avoid “maintenance free” cartridge faucets where at all possible, because it’s less hassle to spend 30 mins replacing a washer every 2 years than it is to waste 2 weeks to source one of those damn stupid cartridges every 5 years.
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Bill says:
It seems the last decade or two has really seen an explosion of designs, seemingly each with its own custom parts. It is apparently easier to manufacture to specification these days. The fixtures in my house are about 60 years old when there were only a handful of cartridge designs and they’re still easy to find at big box hardware stores. The kitchen faucet is a bit of a problem because it is Sears/Valley Brass, and I believe Valley is out of business. Danco still makes Valley cartridges, but the one they make with the sprayer bypass valve is junk and it is getting difficult to find real Valley replacement parts. I am going to hang onto the kitchen faucet as long as possible because it is all metal.
Glacier Bay has some inexpensive all metal faucets, but they have the problem that a run will be made by some random supplier in a China, Inc. and then that supplier disappears leaving an orphan product without repair parts. Glacier Bay is cheap enough that you can just replace the whole fixture, but I don’t like the idea of dumping something that could be repaired into a landfill.
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DKE says:
Same story only different. Kitchen faucet from Costco. Yep, died just short of two years with unobtainium repair parts. Yep, Costco has that awesome return policy and I can get my money back. Still have to replace the bloody faucet.
Costco for plumbing fixtures – nope. Never again.
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Miroslav says:
Don’t worry. Your wife will buy it because she ” likes the looks of it” and ” it was on sale”. And you will be left with the only choice possible.
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SteveT says:
A few thoughts
Harvesting chips from boards is not that difficult. It takes the proper tools and procedures, but it is done in low volume production when parts are out of production. I’ve seen it done to support old service parts for automotive applications.
No car company is going to do this for regular production. Auto OEMs use millions of micros and are getting priority from the IC suppliers. Add to that a harsh environment and high cost of replacing parts after they are out in the field and they will not touch this just to get a few more vehicles out.
I could totally see a lab equipment manufacturer doing this. If I was in charge and the customer was screaming they needed my $500k machine, why not do this, then agree to replace the board later? High value lab equipment gets regular support calls and usually the boards and modules are easily replaceable so the incremental cost to replace would not be that bad.
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BobH says:
Agree.
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Elliot Williams says:
“No car company…” I can tell you a story that I have now heard from two different people involved in the automotive industry.
A certain car manufacturer ends the production line with the cars actually fired up and driven off to storage. When a dashboard part was missing, and the car could not be started, it blocked up the whole production line. They created a short run of substitute / temporary dashboards so that they could keep the lines flowing. They swap them in, drive the car out of the way, and then swap them back out.
As you say, they’re not selling the cars with the ersatz dashboards, but when something like this blocks an entire line, you do whatever is necessary in the short run. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they visited the junk yard, or pulled them off washing machines, or other heroics.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
Back in the college break temping days, I had a toe in the warehousing/storage side, and we’d sometimes have to deal with cars that had parts missing, and had to be shoved around, because they wouldn’t move under their own power. The explanation given was that these were less popular trims that in order to complete orders for factory ordered or more popular trims, they’d had parts pulled due to supply shortage at some point. We occassionally had a manufacturer van pul up at the facility and do a load of part installs or swaps (recall) or for all I know, additional harvesting.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
Ah yeah, we also had some cars there missing non-essential (for operation) parts, missing trim pieces, accessory switches off the dash, no back seat or something, and we’d have to get together a whole transporter load of them (or severall) to go back to the factory to be finished. Guess they kept churning them out with parts missing and ran out of space on the factory lot.
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Michael Black says:
In Heinlein’s Door into Summer, they crush cars that have not been used. Provides employment. But the cars are incomplete, they could never work.
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Scoldog says:
I’m in the automotive industry in Australia.
Our CJD dealerships are overflowing with buggered customer cars that can’t move at the moment thanks to the combination chip shortage and COVID delays. Some of them have been sitting there for about 6 months now waiting on parts out of the US
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tonerbaloner says:
Can someone PLEASE tell me what this article’s image is from? It rings a bell but I can’t place it, and it’s killing me. Image searches turned up nothing! I just know it’s from some cartoon film I’ve seen before…
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Tom Nardi says:
While it’s possible he was inspired by some old cartoon, this particular image is original work by our Art Director Joe Kim.
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Ross Reedstrom says:
Pretty direct (ahem) “homage” to Beggar Jafar. Be careful, the House of Mouse may CDL you.
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Foldi-One says:
Very much looks like the ‘crazy old man’ in Aladdin
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Py says:
Aladdin (1992 Disney film)
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HaHa says:
Similar to the bad guy in ‘Wizards’.
The mouse likely stole it and now thinks they own it. If they didn’t just buy it.
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paulvdh says:
I think this crazy potato fries teeth guy has starred on some other Hackaday articles in the past.
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Michael Black says:
A few years ago, and I can’t remember where, there was a detailed story about a company offering backup but a shortage of hard drives. But external drives stayed at a reasonable price. So they’d go to big box stores and buy them up, extracting the drives and scrapping the box and interface. They kept needing more, so they’d involve more people to go out and buy them. I think they came up against limits on how many someone could buy, so more reason for friends and family.
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DKE says:
Backblaze.
Interesting side note, this process became known as “smurfing”. Lots of little smurfs out gathering…
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craig says:
Old Man Story: When I was little, Levis were still made in San Francisco and my mother got out the sewing machine and made me overalls because Levis were too expensive. She also grew up financially strapped and taught herself to sew with a second hand Singer Featherweight machine so that she would have nice clothing to wear in Jr. High and High school. She could take that machine apart in her sleep and repair anything to do with it, and used that same machine to make my clothing. Within the time I was wearing such items, manufacturing moved over seas and became so inexpensive that it wasn’t worth her time to make me clothing anymore, the fabric, buttons etc costing as much as the finished good not even including her time and labor.
As an (american) society, the majority of the population cannot do the equivalent of make your own clothing, let alone teach yourself such a skill, something my mom did with minimal formal education. So, that is a long way to go to basically say, good. All these stupid supply chain issues were brought on by our own dumb selves. If this means we go back to “dumb” appliance that just freaking work or are at least user-servicable like Mom’s Singer, that don’t need wifi for the microwave to function, and don’t need microprocessors for even the simplest task (literally light bulbs have microprocessors in them!) Good. Good good good. Learn a damn skill and leverage these shortages to pressure government regulators into shaping this country into a bunch of self-sufficient skilled persons instead of an ignorant, cheap, lazy society.-
a_do_z says:
There’s a functional Featherweight (AKA 221K) and a few other fully operational, ancient sewing machines around my house. A couple of which don’t require electricity. Those things were indeed built to last.
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mayhem says:
I inherited a singer featherweight centennial edition from my mom. It has got to be one of the greatest sowing machines ever made. It sat in storage for 20 plus years before I got it. Some internet research and a good lube job later and it was up and working like new! Kinda wierd my wife doesn’t know how to sow but I do! Thanks mom!
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oliver says:
@craig
Agreed on the situation of the younger generation, how do we inspire them? I have a mother that worked (until a few weeks ago) at a big box store changing watch batteries and fixing jewelry. She was the go-to in the area.My Mom also had an old Singer that I learned in the 80’s when I was little how to mend clothing because she showed my how to use it.
Along with my father, she would encourage myself and my siblings to figure things out for ourselves. Now I’m in electronics and sometimes have to change my PCBs to adapt to these part shortages. I hope we aren’t filling landfills with perfectly good washing machines (and other) because they don’t have a micro.
I also wish my car didn’t know when my phone was in it, and vice-versa…
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craig says:
Man, I typed a super long answer but without going off the deep end and talking about politics, I think 1. Mandatory public school education in the trades 2. Stiff (like, 3x-10x the price) tariff and regulation of cheap imported goods to drive return of domestic manufacturing and hopefully return of a bumping middle class and repair industry for when you don’t want to fix your own stuff 3. Right to repair laws for manufacturers in order to utilize the skills of #1. Maybe then society will get a little better if we realize, perhaps, that being able to read celebrity tweets while taking a morning dump on a semi-disposable iPhone that costs $4000 isn’t *that* important. Maybe just fix the washing machine yourself and take the rest of the afternoon to go on a hike.
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X says:
Better to learn a skill that pays good money and then you can pay someone else to fix your clothes. Why hoard your money when you can spread it around to others. We should value sharing so that we are not all fixing our clothes.
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craig says:
I just dropped a comment above, but we are saying the same thing. I would love to either fix my own clothing or pay someone else a decent wage to fix it for me. Right now, the HUGE problem is that tossing it in landfill and buying a new one is massively cheaper and easier. It isn’t worth it for anyone to patch up a $3 t shirt. That is the problem. When I was little I put patches on the knees of my blown out pants. Now the patches from fabric store cost the same amount as a new pair on sale at Target.
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Ostracus says:
People who cosplay should know how to sew.
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jenningsthecat says:
“Learn a damn skill and leverage these shortages to pressure government regulators into shaping this country into a bunch of self-sufficient skilled persons instead of an ignorant, cheap, lazy society.”
Sadly, governments – at least in the industrialized world – are beholden to the corporations. They sell us the goods that are overly complicated, that spy on us, and that increasingly are owned by the corporations. (The last category includes most computers and phones – if it has Windows 10 / 11 or Android on it, Microsoft or Google owns it even though you paid for it.
The point being that the governments have no interest in a skilled, independent population, because their masters have no interest in it. Our (collective) inability to make, repair, modify, and decide things for ourselves, is the corporations’ bread and butter.
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maxzillian says:
I already had to do something of the sort last year, but for prototypes. We needed a number of CAN transceiver ICs that were indicating a 50+ week lead time. So ultimately we spent about $1000 on dev boards to harvest $100 worth of chips. I got out the hot air rework station, depopulated the boards, and shipped the ICs to our manufacturer.
It’s wasteful, but not as wasteful as missing a season of testing.
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LAK says:
Counterfeiters have been recycling parts for years. And yes, it is hard to pull chips from old hardware and maintain their integrity. That’s why counterfeits often fail prematurely. Its the walking wounded that are an issue. Want your US car’s auto steering to make an unexpected left-turn maneuver due to a failed part? Nothing like finding out the hard way there needs to be a recall.
As a kid, I recycled parts from old computer boards all the time (that’s parts with leads, folks). For many years I never had a resistor or capacitor with leads over a quarter of an inch long. Some of those old projects that survived many moves (over 50 years old) may still work. But they were simple and were never expected to be reliable.
As for “a chip arbitrage” site, I know of no commercial sites (unless you would consider ebay – which I do not recommend.)
Military programs have been doing this intercompany and intracompany for many, many years. We have even gone to competitors, with a customer program representative, to request critical parts.
I needed a hard to find CD4000 SOS (Silicon On Sapphire) series part for a space design and we went as far as Goddard Space Flight Center’s parts folks for help. We were working on a NASA program, but not a Goddard program. Goddard still considered our request. In another more recent intracompany case, our space sector reached out to an airborne sector for some military fasteners. We requested 500 pcs. The airborne sector buyer came back and said 500 pieces or 500 pounds? Apparently they use a lot more fasteners than we did. Unfortunately airborne did not have the tiny fasteners we needed anyway.
The problem with this kind of exchange is maintaining control of the parts. The CD4000 parts I needed are ESD sensitive. How do I KNOW the parts I get from an “arbitrage” site were handled in an ESD safe way between the manufacturer and the source company or individual? The aerospace company I worked for would not buy factory returns even from reputable sources because that trace could not be guaranteed. But we built hardware that was required by contract to meet certain very high reliability requirements.
Perhaps for a personal project reliability is not as important. “Makers” buy cheap electronics from China all the time. a few parts may fail, but hey, they were cheap, right? So no big deal. (Really it is a big deal, but that is another issue entirely.)
Or for commercial products, the warranties could reflect the risk of mishandled or even recycled parts.
I would think, however, that any company not clearly stating they are using recycled parts in new products would be legally liable for misrepresenting their products as “new”.
If recycled parts are used on a military program, the risk of fines and jail time are real and substantial.
That is not to say it can’t be done. I did it with a 2K x 8 bi-polar prom that was unobtanium. We pulled a part from a flight board that failed mechanical testing and used it on a redesigned flight board. The customer was fully aware of my actions and additional part and assembly testing were required by the customer and our program. The assembly’s flight mission status was “nominal” its entire mission life. While “nominal” may sound boring, and it is boring, it is also good.
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RW ver 0.0.3 says:
I would question the competence of an automotive electronics designer if a vheicle pulled hard left when a part failed more so than why the part failed.
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Spectrum says:
Any time you have shortages, rumors abound. $150 washing machines most likely don’t have the technology inside to supply any usable parts for salvage. $800 washing machines may. However, spending a ton of money on labor and supplies +the cost of the machines and the disposal of those machines would be cost prohibited just to retrieve a$10 part makes bad business sense.
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SteveS says:
I keep hearing this washing machine story, but nobody ever has the actual details.
I’m just assuming that, like a lot of this stuff, it all goes back to one incident where some smart hacker pulled, say, a motor control module out of a washing machine and used it to repair a fuel pump on a critical machine, and suddenly it was just one of those anecdotes that takes on a life of its own.
Like the stories of Cuban mechanics making washers out of otherwise worthless coins, sure, I totally believe it happened at some point – but it’s probably not really a thing people *do* as a baseline task.
In the absence of an emergency fix, I simply cant see where a washing machine – one of the most cost-optimized devices on the face of the earth – contains anything worth the effort to locate, ship, disassemble and cannibalize. If that were true, It would make much more sense for everyone involved to simply contact the appliance company and offer them half the cost of the whole washing machine just to buy the part still in the tubes. the appliance company could improve it’s profit by tenfold by simply idling the factory and selling parts from its inventory, and *still* be able to complete and sell the unfinished machines at some point in the future.
All that being said I will completely agree that the current supply chain chaos sucks. I have lost track of how many engineering changes I’ve had to make simply because some commodity part – looking at you here, Molex – has suddenly become 50 week unobtanium
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Lewis says:
Well, as an electronics technician, I can tell you that my mother had a Mayfag washer that DID fag completely after she died. Upon troubleshooting it, I was surprised to find out that it had a motor control board that changed single phase house current to DC and then used six IGFETs to switch that at the property times to create three phase AC. The motor was a three phase motor. There was some pretty complicated circuitry that controlled the IGFETs, but I don’t remember if there was anything like a microprocessor or not. That was ten years ago. I’m not sure how old the machine was. I was able to identify several bad components but never found the point where the trouble was initiated. That board is still in my garage, though. One day, maybe I’ll have a need for the IGFETs that are still good on it.
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HaHa says:
Source for small frequency drive and 3 phase motor!
If you know the model, please post.
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Phil0 Sophic says:
And reading an article the other day that revealed two US ic manufacturers refused to build additional fabs unless the government frees up some cash for them. Well I’ll be, corporate welfare has gotten mainstream and downright demanding. Guess they learned from Big Oil how to blackmail the US govt to pay for their infrastructure.
Corporatosity.-
RW ver 0.0.1 says:
William O. Douglas noticed that some decades ago “Our upside down welfare state is socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor.”
Then Noam Chomsky has expounded upon it in recent decades, calling it radical statism to provide a welfare state for the rich.
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HaHa says:
Chomsky? The Cambodian holocaust denier?
Ignore him, unless your are discussing linguistics. Even there, it looks like his key insight was wrong, there is no hard brain wiring for language.
He’s got a very bad case of Shockley’s syndrome. Being good at one thing (linguistics), so talking out wrong end about stuff he knows nothing about (politics and economics). However many morons agree with him, so given a platform. Yeah Marx (not Groucho) is their only point.
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Lewis says:
And the railroads. Don’t forget them.
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HaHa says:
That’s a big reason why government power is a problem.
Those that run it will be corrupt and hence for sale. There is no solution except to not let them have the power to sell in the first place.
Keep the beast broke and it will focus on what it should be doing. Starve it at every opportunity. If you don’t cheat on your taxes, you are especially to blame.
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Mike says:
The chip companys don’t want to put up the up front capital to build new production lines. So they are waiting for our government to subsidize it . The article was just on Yahoo news a day ago.
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RP says:
Utter rubbish. No facts just Snopes level myths.
I expected better from Hackaday.-
Val says:
Seems like the primary source is a speech by the CEO of ASML, to me that’s not such a bad primary source, even though he doesn’t mention which company, but that makes sense, you could litteraly blackmail them for their critical parts then.
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I’m special I guess says:
In college I worked one afternoon at a facility that manufactures smoke alarms. Dude hired me on the spot and I started working that moment. He took me into a room with a couple folding tables and about 15 special needs people. Their jobs were to take a part out of a bin and place it in the correct holes on the board and past it along. My job was to solder them on after rearranging them according to the diagram printed on the top of the board. After about 2 hours they sounded a buzzer which meant break time. I went to my car “for a smoke” and never came back. I call that volunteer hours.
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HaHa says:
My experience with special needs people in manufacturing has been the opposite.
Some, at least, are great at meticulous tedious work. Better than most average morons, who get bored in about 2 hours.
You do need to train them, in detail.
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Ruff says:
The way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future they charged you to go through a dump site to find useful items.
Madmax for hackers.
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RW ver 0.0.1 says:
That’s how wreckers yards have operated for decades :-D
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Dave says:
LOL a new washing machine that costs $150… I need to get one of those to match the $25 stove and $69.95 refrigerator. that I bought new last week. Maybe with those I can get parts to finish my $250 Tesla Model S clone.
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X says:
The vital chip in my project is unavailable from all the usual sources but it’s readily available on ebay as a tiny PCB module. I had given up hope but now the project is back on track.
These are the IDEAL conditions for competitive cloning. If you can make clones of STM32 parts, there are many pots of gold in easy reach.
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Lewis says:
Back in the early 80s, I was working on a project at a defense subcontractor, and had to supply positive and negative 30 VDC to a unit being tested. The tolerance of the two voltages was plus or minus 0.005 V, or 5 mV. That was a very close tolerance for a 30 VDC supply, in those days. We had no power supplies with an adjustment that fine.
But one day, I had spied some old telephone switching equipment sitting on the side of an old dirt road that went through the woods to an automotive junkyard. I asked the owner of the business if I could scavenge some parts from it. He gave the okay, so I went and salvaged several 10-turn, wire wound, potentiometers and their associated 10-turn dials. With those, I was able to fine adjust those voltages to 30 V + or – 5 mV and run the test. Junk had saved the day!
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Gigapuddi Inc. says:
I heard this urban legend for a lot of companies in very, very different branches. Even pre-covid.
Most irritating thing about: while everything gets out of stock, its not hard to get a washing machine. -
Redhatter (VK4MSL) says:
My workplace went through a flood earlier this year…
https://stuartl.longlandclan.id.au/blog/tag/brisbane-flood-2022/
Aside from having to do all kinds of network voodoo to re-link employees to company infrastructure that had been rescued from the flood-zone and put in a place with functional power and Internet… we had a whole heap of stock to try and rescue.
My workplace had bought up a whole pile of ruggedised Intel NUCs, and some off-brand NUC-style machines made by Leader Computers, with the idea of maintaining a decent stock… Brisbane River decided to get out of bed and check out Douglas Street, and all that stock went swimming.
We tried to save some stuff which we knew had some protection from water ingress, but some of the expensive electrical meters just got tossed because once we opened them to clean them up, they’d need to be re-certified, and there was no guarantee they’d pass.
We also had a heap of embedded wireless data loggers go in the drink. Those had a conformal coating, so aside from some rust on some RF shields (easily replaced), they all survived bar two (out of about 300 or so).
The interesting bit is we invariably had the odd failed board kicking around, which normally would just go to e-waste. These data loggers have RS-485 transceivers and a 22dBm 2.4GHz front-end module, both of which are facing supply issues. Guess where we’ve been getting some parts from?
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NiHaoMike says:
“We tried to save some stuff which we knew had some protection from water ingress, but some of the expensive electrical meters just got tossed because once we opened them to clean them up, they’d need to be re-certified, and there was no guarantee they’d pass.”
Sounds like something to sell on Ebay or Craigslist as “water damaged, as-is”, I’m sure there’s plenty of hobbyists who don’t care too much about calibration.-
Redhatter (VK4MSL) says:
Yeah well … without the programming software for these meters (mostly EDMI Atlas Mk10s), you’re dealing with a pretty bulky paperweight.
Proprietary protocol, proprietary programming software. Lots of undocumented gotchas even if you do have the documentation. I speak from experience having written about 3 different drivers for meters from this company (one for their earlier Mk3 & Mk6 series, one in Python 2.7 for the Mk7/Mk10… and the latest one was in NodeJS).
You’d be ripping the things apart to re-flash the MCU I suspect. Sadly, I do not know what Brisbane City Council tip wound up with them, otherwise I’d tell you to go there and help yourself. You missed the Douglas St. Tip by about 3 months.
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Henrik says:
Years ago, the company, I worked for, needed an LCD display costing around $100 each.
My boss went out toy shopping and came across a toy named (something like) “My First Computer” for children. He looked at it and found, that the LCD seemed familiar. He bought one, and I unsoldered the LCD. It was the EXACT model, we needed!!!
We then continued to order 100 units, took them apart and used the LCDs for our product.
I’d like to have seen the person approving the invoice for 100 toy computers :D
But, anyhoo, the notion of disassembling other electronic equipment to get chips is not that far fetched: I recall a restricted chip found in Russian equipment. Long search later, it was discovered, that the chip in question came from cheap RC cars sold via Korea.
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Winston says:
Where The Real Chip Shortage Is
386,302 views – Jun 12, 2022. I have spent a lot of time on this channel talking about sexy, leading edge engineering things like Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography and so on. But the reality is that the chip shortage’s greatest hurt hits far from the leading edge. In this video, we are going to talk about the massive shortage in trailing-edge semiconductors, and why it’s so hard to fix.
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Giin says:
So how does this line up with the chip manufacturers announcing last week that chip demand is finally falling off, and they’re beginning to slow chip production to match the reduced demand? Is the chip shortage mainly a supply chain issue now as intermediaries build chips into parts and those parts are what are still in short supply?
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Steven Naslund says:
The thing that seems odd about the story to me is that if you needed a microcontroller there are probably smaller devices that have them other than washing machines. Wouldn’t you try to find the smallest, cheapest device to scavenge the parts from?
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设置模拟AP的过程中，系统提示ICS配置失败，该提示可能会影响模拟AP的正常使用，如下图：
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Silicon manufacturers are cannibalizing washing machines as chip shortage continues The executive believes the chip shortage will last well into 2023 By
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