Re: Miraculous button makes things work again.

Dang it, Jeff, that last suggestion of yours is my go-to principal design technique. :(

To charge for the repair. Yes, I have seen this before, in some expensive machine. They told us in training about the secret reset button.

Miraculous design worked well for biblical prototypes but not so well meeting modern standards and safety requirements. Fortunately, miraculous design might soon be replaced by AI and other forms of traditional magic which does not require a miracle to function. If you are uncertain as to which approach is best for whatever you're building, I suggest you consider reverse engineering, patent infringement, cloning the competition, changing the specs, faking the test data, bribing the inspector and other modern engineering practices. It also helps to have a designated culprit or scapegoat available. Good luck.

Or the cunningly hidden additional thermal cutout or fuse.

It is what "repair cafes" are for - to mend things that are in fact perfectly OK but have been disabled by designed in obsolescence.

Yah, and some of them have a very specific finger dance to get it to reset.

Push and hold the reset button while plugging in the power cord until the green light flashes red 5 times. Release the reset button for 60 seconds then press the wifi button until the yellow led flashes red. Warning: Failure to follow these directions exactly will turn your $500 plastic piece of crap into a forever brick.

The dances are there usually when there is no dedicated reset button.

I recall one particularly painful reset method on an Andriod device that required holding in the tiny on/off switch and volume-down buttons for

Some things do that automatically.

Various smart speakers and some high end internet tuners for example when the protocols are changed and the makers CBA to support old kit.

That's incredible. (well, not really, since I believe you, so it must be credible.)

Where was this training, in the US or Spain? And if they tell people like you, what prevents the people they tell from telling everyone else? I guess they have to tell someone or it wouldn't be of any value, but I'd think they'd be worried everyone not doing repairs would be annoyed when they heard about this.

What made it break when it did, about 15 years after I bought it. Is it on a timer? Will it break again in another 15 years? Or maybe it's operational time, not calendar time. For maybe 10 years I recorded 3 hours a day and played back 3 hours a day. plus some more time watching what wasn't recorded. 3 or 4 years I left it running (and the hard drive spinning I guess) 4 or 5 days of the week. So it was running for

Both :-)

It was an international USA company. I'm not going to say the culprit, that product seems to be still active (which surprises me). Ah, no, the current supplier says it is EOL.

:-D

Who knows. But my guess is that any machine that has some sort of computer inside must have some reset method.

We recently did a box that uses the Raspberry Pi RP2040 cpu chip. The Pico board has two pushbuttons, reset and boot. We have a single push button accessed from outside our box, with a toothpick or something. A

A user can put a sticker over the pushbutton hole if he wants. Some do.

We have a horrible new Panasonic microwave oven. The BEEP is ear-splitting. The procedure to silence it is complex, and only works if the door is open.

Does it keep forgetting it was silenced, so you have to do this procedure multiple times?

On one occasion, I muted an obnoxious beeper by stuffing chewing gum into it. There! Problem solved.

Jeroen Belleman

I break the piezo buzzer, if I can get at it.

We should arrest whoever invented piezo buzzers. Put him in a prison cell with 100 piezos.

My microwave oven has a little metal gong, When the timer has run back to zero, it releases a tiny hammer and the gong goes "ping!" Perhaps one day they will re-invent this idea and hail it as a great improvment.

How about a knob that you turn, the more you turn it the longer the microwave runs.

I'm sorry to tell you that has already been thought of - and my microwave oven is already equipped with it.

It has another ingenious feature which I haven't seen anywhere else: The timer motor is wired to the magnetron circuit so that it only runs when the magnetron is energised. The dial behind the knob is dual-marked; one set of markings shows the sum of the actual heating time and the other set shows how long this takes in real time when the magnetron is pulsed at lower power settings.

Clever, eh!!

Thanks, Jeff!

I would never, ever buy anything from a company who used such tactics to screw customers over. For a similar reason, I would never buy a VW car after it emerged they were purposlely falsifying their emissions tests by a similar sort of scheme.