Teardown Of A Persil Smartwash Smart Laundry Detergent Ball

How to make doing laundry more smart, depending on your perspective. (Credit: Zerobrain, YouTube)
How to make doing laundry more smart, depending on your perspective. (Credit: Zerobrain, YouTube)

Ever since the invention of washing machines, the process of doing laundry has become rather straightforward. Simply toss the dirty laundry into the machine, fill up the detergent, and let the preset program handle the rest. This of course has not prevented companies from coming up with ways to add more complexity to doing laundry, with Henkel’s Smartwash technology the latest example, as demonstrated by German YouTube channel [ZeroBrain] with a complete teardown.

Henkel is the owner of detergent brands like Persil and Somat, with the Smartwash ball supposedly offering ‘smart’ dosing of detergent for washing machines, with naturally a smartphone app with intrusive localization to personalize the laundry experience. Sadly the video is only in German, but the language of teardowns is universal.

Before the teardown, the device got tested as intended, with the video showing how to put the detergent with its special pod inside the device. The device then got connected to WiFi, followed by it performing the typical IoT firmware update. After half an hour [Zerobrain] was finally ready to do the laundry. During the washing cycle the 441 gram heavy ball audibly bounced inside the machine, though the rubber outside covering should prevent damage.

The IP68-rated internals are clearly not designed to be easily opened, requiring a certain level of violence to correct for this oversight. Eventually the internals are revealed, showing the inductive charging coil, controls pad and main PCB, along with a pump for the double-chambered detergent pod and a bunch of sensors dangling at the end of flexible PCBs.

The Persil Smartwash fully disassembled. (Credit: Zerobrain, YouTube)
The Persil Smartwash fully disassembled. (Credit: Zerobrain, YouTube)

Interestingly, the heart of the main PCB is an ESP32-D0WD-V3, flanked by an ESP-PSRAMH 64 Mbit pseudo-static RAM. For charging the Li-ion cell a TP4056 is used, while a T3168 handles the wireless (Qi) power side of things. As for sensors, there are two Hall effect sensors that seem to be used to measure how much detergent and softener are being excreted by the pump.

What is fascinating is that it uses a single pump to pump both types of fluids independently from each other. There also appears to be a presence sensor to detect the presence of a pod, and some of the other ICs on the PCB may be an IMU to detect motion of the ball, but as hinted at in the accompanying app, you are still supposed to know the hardness of the local water supply and punch in the same details like laundry dirtiness that you’d normally read off the label on the detergent and softener packaging.

 

Thanks to [Jan Prägert] for the tip.

3 thoughts on “Teardown Of A Persil Smartwash Smart Laundry Detergent Ball

  1. Smart… wifi connected…. laundry detergent pods….
    Which are actually full of well-engineered sensors and pumps, because that’s important when you’re dealing with … (checks notes) … laundry detergent.
    Which itself comes in a specialized single-use cartridge…

    You really should have saved this one for the April 1st “is this a real thing” edition, because reality is getting harder and harder to understand.

  2. Perhaps in the future, March 31st could be the one day of the year when Big Capital trolls us with products that aren’t totally f’ing stupid. It would give them a whole year to come up with something sensible and useful, without risk of having to make it, as they can just cancel it because it’s EOFY

  3. I somehow doubt that thing would survive in the old-fashioned Borg-Warner coin-up double-capacity front loader that I used to have at the laundromat I worked at as a kid. Debatable whether it would tolerate the agitator in a Maytag A21 top-loader.

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