39C3: Hacking Washing Machines

December 29, 2025 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

Many of us have them, few of us really hack on them: well, here we’re talking about large home appliances. [Severin von Wnuck-Lipinski] and [Hajo Noerenberg] were both working on washing machines, found each other, and formed a glorious cooperation that ended in the unholy union of German super-brands Miele and B/S/H — a Miele washer remote controlled by Siemens’ web app.

This talk, given at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3), is about much more than the stunt hack, however. In fact, we covered [Severin]’s work on the very clever, but proprietary, Miele Diagnostic Interface a little while ago. But now, he’s got it fully integrated into his home automation system. It’s a great hack, and you can implement it without even opening the box.

About halfway through the talk, [Hajo] takes over, dissecting the internal D-Bus communication protocol. Here, you have to open up the box, but then you get easy access to everything about the internal state of the machine. And D-Bus seems to be used in a wide range of B/S/H/ home appliances, so this overview should give you footing for your own experimentation on coffee machines or dishwashers as well. Of course, he wires up an ESP32 to the bus, and connects everything, at the lowest level, to his home automation system, but he also went the extra mile and wrote up a software stack to support it.

It’s a great talk, with equal parts humor and heroic hacking. If you’re thinking about expanding out your own home automation setup, or are even just curious about what goes on inside those machines these days, you should absolutely give it a watch.

Editor Note: The “S” is Siemens, which is Hackaday’s parent company’s parent company. Needless to say, they had nothing to do with this work or our reporting on it.

Reverse Engineering The Miele Diagnostic Interface

November 17, 2025 by Maya Posch 22 Comments

Since modern household appliances now have an MCU inside, they often have a diagnostic interface and — sometimes — more. Case in point: Miele washing machines, like the one that [Severin] recently fixed, leading to the firmware becoming unhappy and refusing to work. This fortunately turned out to be recoverable by clearing the MCU’s fault memory, but if you’re unlucky, you will have to recalibrate the machine, which requires very special and proprietary software.

Naturally, this led [Severin] down the path of investigating how exactly the Miele Diagnostic Utility (MDU) and the Program Correction (PC) interface communicate. Interestingly, the PC interface uses an infrared LED/receiver combination that’s often combined with a status LED, as indicated by a ‘PC’ symbol. This interface uses the well-known IrDA standard, but [Severin] still had to track down the serial protocol.

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Hackaday Links: September 21, 2025

September 21, 2025 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Remember AOL? For a lot of folks, America Online was their first ISP, the place where they got their first exposure to the Internet, or at least a highly curated version of it. Remembered by the cool kids mainly as the place that the normies used as their ISP and for the mark of shame an “@aol.com” email address bore, the company nevertheless became a media juggernaut, to the point that “AOL Time Warner” was a thing in the early 2000s. We’d have thought the company was long gone by now, but it turns out it’s still around and powerful enough of a brand that it’s being shopped around for $1.5 billion. We’d imagine a large part of that value comes from Yahoo!, which previous owner Verizon merged with AOL before selling most of the combined entity off in 2021, but either way, it’s not chump change.

For our part, the most memorable aspect of AOL was the endless number of CDs they stuffed into mailboxes in the 90s. There was barely a day that went by that one of those things didn’t cross your path, either through the mail or in free bins at store checkouts, or even inside magazines. They were everywhere, and unless you were tempted by the whole “You’ve got mail!” kitsch, they were utterly useless; they didn’t even make good coasters thanks to the hole in the middle. So most of the estimated 2 billion CDs just ended up in the trash, which got us thinking: How much plastic was that? A bit of poking around indicates that a CD contains about 15 grams of polycarbonate, so that’s something like 30,000 metric tonnes! To put that into perspective, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is said to contain “only” around 80,000 metric tonnes of plastic. Clearly the patch isn’t 37% AOL CDs, but it still gives one pause to consider how many resources AOL put into marketing.

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DIY Smart Washing Machine Redesign

November 24, 2023 by Al Williams 18 Comments

[Mellow Labs] wanted a smart washer and built a simple controller. However, he found out after a few weeks it wasn’t working how he wanted. The detergent quit flowing, and he washed clothes with no soap for a week! So, a redesign was in order. You can follow the process and the result in the video below.

A bit of 3D printing, a larger pump, and proper voltage made a big difference. We didn’t see the print files, but unless you have the exact same setup, you’d probably have to customize it anyway. There is a real-time hand-drawn schematic, and the software is probably not hard to pull off the video screen (it is only 18 lines).

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Internet Of Washing Machines Solves An Annoyance

April 15, 2023 by Al Williams 56 Comments

[Laurence Tratt]’s washing machine blew up, so he sprung for a brand new model with all the bells and whistles. Of course, these days, that means it has an Internet connection and an API. While we’re not quite convinced our washing machine actually needs such a thing, at least [Laurence] is making the most of it by creating an interface to the washer’s API that provides a handy countdown on the computer.

Honestly, there was one other option. The washer’s phone app — that sounds funny when you say it out loud — will notify you when the clothes are done. But it doesn’t provide a countdown, and it seems to regularly log you off, which means you don’t get the notifications anymore. You can see the minimal interface in the video below.

The exact combination of curl, jq, and pizauth probably won’t help you unless you have the same washer. On the other hand, it is a good example of how to hit some alien API and work out the details. Any API that uses OAuth2 and JSON won’t look too different. Speaking of OAuth2, that’s the purpose of the pizauth program — which, it turns out, [Laurence] is the author of.

Of course, you can refit an old washing machine to do this, too. We are more likely to steal the machine’s motor than to want to talk to it but to each their own!

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Companies Rumored To Harvest Washing Machines For ICs

July 5, 2022 by Arya Voronova 162 Comments

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.
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The Spin Cycle: Washing Machine Motor Converts 10-Speed To E-Bike

July 6, 2020 by Bryan Cockfield 77 Comments

The “Spin Cycle” is an amazing electric bicycle built using a motor salvaged from a washing machine; when the puns are this perfect you have to roll with them. [jimminecraftguy’s] creation is one of the most hacked-together yet functional electric vehicle we’ve seen in a long time.

The drive train of this bicycle starts with a brushless DC motor from a washing machine. It has been slightly modified to run on 48 volts, and is installed inside the triangle of the bike’s frame. It has a chain driving the bike’s crank, retaining the original chain and gearing setup (unlike many electric bike hacks that utilize hub motors). The crank has also been specially modified to include a freewheel, a necessary feature so that the motor can operate without spinning the pedals. Everything except the motor has been custom fabricated including the mounts and the electronics.

[jimminecraftguy] reports speeds of 110 kph which is a little crazy for a 20-year-old aluminum frame bike, and we’d guess it’s not street legal in many jurisdictions, but we can’t really find much fault with this build in general based on the amount of innovation required to get this working at all. A few more improvements for the build are in the works, including improved batteries and a cover for the sides to keep the local law enforcement from getting too suspicious. We can’t wait to see the final version. Continue reading “The Spin Cycle: Washing Machine Motor Converts 10-Speed To E-Bike” →