Have you ever used a PC that was mounted in a car for a few years?
Yeah, they don't survive that long.
Yahoo had an issue a few years back where they had to move servers across a 100 feet distance through a yard from one data center to another.
They used carts to move the entire servers.
Next thing they new within a year about 5% or 10% of all drives in those servers died.
Not only from physical damage or bearing damage but from plain weak solder points as well.
Those were enterprise grade drives only subjected to vibrations for seconds.
A washer interface board - that by the way is subjected to physical stress (you push buttons, and the fault sequence above sounds like a stuck button issue) - is subjected to vibrations, heat and probably moisture in the form of steam basicly all the time.
It's solid state, just not in conditions you would want a PC to be.
And on the topic of costs: No.
Such a PCB - even scaled to millions of units - is far more expensive until it gets to you.
Development, production, packaging, shipping, handeling until it makes it to the factory is about 10$ perhaps.
And now imagine you have lets say 10k units as parts per model.
A) Dunno in which world you get tax deductions for buildings\land. That is basicly a sunk cost for builduing or buying that space, keeping it up and paying the taxes on that.
Aren't property taxes kind of a thing every American hates?
B) Even if you only need let's say 1 person to handle all the parts for one specific model (from inventory to searching for them to shipping them out), you have maybe 1000 models you keep stock for.
For 10 years.
That person makes 60k a year, let's say.
Over your entire operation, you always have yearly costs of 60 million dollars just for staff PER YEAR.
And you have to store and keep track of 10 million parts.
And at the end, you might still have to liquidate them at a loss cause no one owns such a machine anymore.
Over 10 years, that woukd be 60$ just in staffing per part.
C) Inflation\lost interest. That board was maybe 100$ as a part when new. That would be 120$ now if we calculate back 10 years.
Over 10 years, even at just 1% interest, they would loose out more than 10$.
The same goes by the way for the staff cost as well.
Yeah sure machines don't last long anymore.
Sure they calculate how long they last. I think the Calypso was terminated when? Like 10 years or so ago?
It was how expensive? 900$?
That's almost 1100$ today.
Investing 1/10 of the price of purchase in repairs and upkeep in a car within the first 10 years of ownership is perfectly normal.
So why not on a washer?
