I've personally been thinking about designing a standard classic drip coffee maker with parts that are easy to manufacture, replace, and clean. I have a personal belief that you should only ever have to buy one of those, and that the only reason that we go through many in a lifetime is because they're made of plastic, the reservoirs are impossible to clean, and the insides are often inaccessible without breaking something.

A lot of Chinese stuff seems to be based on old (but still great) designs, for working with paper and printing, for working with leather, etc.. The shared designs result in a standardization for both parts and replacement between factories and over time; you'll be able to replace your alibaba paper cutter with exactly the same paper cutter 10 years from now. I love it.

The design of modern drip coffee makers. Prior to about 15 years ago, the basket for the grounds was almost always full separated by a compartment from the heating element and pumping area. Slowly, these areas were combined into one, with a plastic lid that covers both where the grounds are place for filtering, and the basin that water sits in. Maybe its a simpler design. Maybe.

By combining the regions, steam builds up and small particles of coffee find their way into the water storage basin (inevitably). Because of this, the heating element and pumping area are exposed to small particles of coffee, which creates buildup, and can clog the elements. Thus, a modern coffee maker designed in this way *will* fail after a number of cycles. There is no way to prevent particles of coffee from getting into the pumping area, and its otherwise inaccessible (no way to clean).

Prior drip coffee makers, they had lasted me as long as I had an urn that still fit them. Never any issues with the mechanism. No issues with buildup or clogs in the water storage area.

Its my number one consideration when purchasing a drip coffee maker.

Separate lids for the grounds and the water reservoir. Spare parts can be ordered, but on the whole the thing just lasts. It comes in a range of hip bright colours, but also just shiny metal.

https://moccamaster.com/

(that said, I switched to cold brew coffee and have used the moccamaster maybe once in the last 6 months)

Edit: Ah, 239 is the MSRP, you can get it for 200, less when it's on sale.

Sorry to break it to you, but that's actually not much money for what good drip machines usually cost. I don't want to sound like a snob (I promise I'm not), but at 229 Euros your "super automatic espresso machine" is probably pretty junk Aldi/Lidl-grade machine or some budget DeLonghi/Philips, that make awful espresso, no offence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuFQbiIVUkw

229 Euros is the cost of a good electric grinder alone, while a decent non-automatic espresso machine starts at north of ~500 Euros for the most basic models, from Sage for example, and fully automatic ones from Jura go for north of ~2000 Euros.

And those brands and prices aren't some snobby enthusiast grade luxury one-of-a-kind machines, but your basic home/small office appliances from reputable makers in the industry.

Yeah, making great espresso is hard as it has so may variables and automatic machines that can pull it off with minimal human intervention are very very expensive. Which is why I recommend people on a budget stay away from automatic machines in that price range as they suck.

I'd recommend James Hoffmann on YouTube for a deep dive into the world of coffee, espresso, grinders and coffee machines. He really opened my horizons to the world of great tasting coffee, with the downside that now, the coffee that I though I enjoyed, and most other commercial made coffee, tastes like crap to me haha.

I'd recommend it to everyone who just likes coffee, but isn't interested in making it their hobby.

You can also like good coffee without making it your hobby, but unfortunately those cheapo budget brand machines aren't it chief. At that price range, their grind uniformity alone must be awful since the corner cutting is taken to the extreme to hit that low price point.

Yeah they make "coffee", but not good coffee, which I guess for most consumers that never tasted good coffee and have no standards and just need a hit of caffeine in the morning is fine, which is why they sell so well to the general public, but if you buy great beans, running them through a cheap and lousy machine is kinda wasteful, as you're not getting the most out of your expensive beans.

I also though the coffee my cheap machines at home/office was great for many years, until I tried a Sage, Jura or other methods/grinders that really make good coffee and I couldn't drink the previous coffee anymore. It tasted trash. There is no comparison, the difference is night and day.

But if you enjoy yours that's fine and that's all that matters.

Nothing wrong with going for budget options all the time if that's what you're into (traditional German stinginess I guess, haha :D), but there's a reason most good coffee and appliances cost what they cost, and you can definitely taste it without being a snob.

You won't find many cheaper models that have the grounds and water reservoir not under the same cover. Most €50 to €100 models have them under a shared lid, because that particular design (while flawed as noted above) is cheap to manufacture. You also won't find cheaper models that haven't been over-optimized for production costs and where the cutting of corners will render them broken in ten years time.

It doesn't grind your beans for you, but for that I simply use a vintage wall mounted grinder I restored. Those can be had for a few Euro in any charity shop.

It's simply not worth it to most of us. OTOH, a long time ago I spent $200 on a KitchenAid mixer that is all but indestructible and has a healthy supply of spare parts for the occasions when something does break. Having a mixer that can power through stiff bread dough is worth $200 (probably far more now due to inflation) to me. Having a coffeemaker that's easy to clean is not.

Fun fact: I had a coffee maker literally catch fire because of a build-up of coffee grinds on the water heating element.

Can you point to some examples? Just so I can share what to avoid :O

The specific mechanism that gums up the works occurs at 6:45. When you raise the lid of the modern version, grounds and coffee bits that have dusted up to the lid of the coffee maker drip via condensation into rear water reservoir.

For greater detail, juxtapose minutes 8-11 with minutes 16-21.

Mr. Coffee represents the king of drip still. And it is the greatest contributor to this fundamental design flaw (imp).

I went through a long and tortuous path through coffee making techniques and eventually tried cold brew.

The idea is to soak the coffee in cold water 12-24 hours and filter the result.

The coffee is wonderful and lacks the bitterness of brewed coffee.

Back a little on-topic - the apparatus to make cold brew coffee is a bit simpler than hot coffeemakers.

This might help incentivize consumers and producers. As an added benefit, they could upgrade components along the way, e.g. smart home integration with new standards for replacement parts.

We need modularity, more like a desktop PC or 3d printers, standard parts and interfaces. You don't have to throw that away (including screen, keyboard) when a stick of RAM breaks, for example.

I think your 5x example is unrealistic. It might be that much currently because long-lived rapairable devices are a boutique niche.

But if stuff in general were built more with commodity modules (of whatever quality), it could actually be cheaper than custom designs, with their design overhead and lower-mass production.

But the thing is, even if it's slightly more expensive to manufacture initially (and with electronics, it's often about mere pennies), the actual cost, if you factor in all the external costs transport/transport infrastructure, disposal, etc, etc, and especially the environmental cost, it's much higher for 'fast appliances' (ala fast fashion) than for longer-lived, more repairable choices.

We have such a throwaway culture that prototyping and experimentation has a fairly low bar/cost. Getting serious and building a "sellable" product can have a bit of a ramp (my opinion due to the administrative and scale aspects which can arguably distract from the goal) but if you stick to the "by-the/for-the community" approach I feel we have a great moment where the protocols and many of the tools are open to try with.

The challenge is the electrical side if you come from software and vice-versa. There are plenty of resources but it's scattered and getting started ends up touching a little bit of everything.

Python and Arduino / Pi have been incredibly friendly to augment and don't feel like you need to start from scratch, take something that exists and extend it.

Zigbee, X10, WiFi, and Bluetooth LE are all common and open ways to talk with easy to comeby plug-and-play ish modules/hats for microcontrollers.

I suggest Python, not necessarily my favorite, but by far the friendliest and batteries included for experimentation.

I think the trick is for many things you have to buy the commercial version to get something that's going to last "forever" or be built for repairability. The tough part is, do you want to buy a $3k commercial dishwasher when you could buy 6 $500 non-commercial dishwashers. I personally chose to buy the commercial washing machine and dryer, but I still have the "disposable" kitchen appliances that came with my house. When it's time to replace them I'll consider the upgrade. Depends on if this is my "forever" home.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/674877/

As an embedded systems engineer, I even considered designing a replacement controller, but that thought died the instant I found one for $30 on eBay. That, and the reality of the situation is that when I can buy a replacement washer for $400, I have no incentive to spend dozens of hours redesigning a control. Maybe if I was bored and wanted to create an OSHW project that maybe 5 other people on the planet would use.

With regards to the cnc machine, yes it is more doable, but now with more time, money and knowledge required. Open source appliances are definitely not bad -- I can't imagine a downside to them -- but they can't do the same thing that open source software does.

This is nowhere remotely near true. I've been testing SLS-printed diamond blades and coring bits for two years, now. They work just fine, and last longer than their stamped/brazed equivalents.

>The two most common powder bed fusion 3D printing systems today are plastic-based, commonly referred to as SLS, and metal-based, known as direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) or selective laser melting (SLM).

Selective LASER Sintering/melting is a form of powder bed deposition printing. You get materials in a powder form (usually thermoplastics, but there are metal versions used in heavy industry) and hit them with a LASER to fuse them together. It is an additive form of fabrication. You can print most of the parts you'd need for something like a blender or microwave, structurally-speaking. You'd not be printing the actual hardware components like the magnets for a motor, nor would you be printing diamond, as you need way more than a LASER to make that happen. You could print the regular non-PCB wiring with powdered copper filler. The cost is not quite reasonable for wanting to work with metal those machines get pricey due to the extremely high-powered LASERs required.

I just buy SLS-printed diamond-embedded lapidary blades and use them. They're metal, with 10mm segments of diamond-embedded metal at the rims.

Can you point me a direction where I can learn more about this?

I have a thing that I want to make and this might be a potential path.

People don't write their own open source. Expertise and economies of scale are a thing. I'm fine with buying my open source appliance from Walmart, as long as I can get parts from everywhere and download a manual that tells me how to fix everything that goes wrong with it.

True, people don't write their open source, but what distinguishes open code from open blueprints is that in software the plan, ie. the source code is the product, only in binary form, where with an open blueprint or schematic the product is only defined by the plans. The point being that having a good plan cannot ensure a good end device, especially if the opposite is incentivized.

>I'm fine with buying my open source appliance from Walmart, as long as I can get parts from everywhere

This assumes that the parts from everywhere are not themselves low quality, which may be a fair assumption since they are parts not a product. But if this becomes feasible, and the manufacturers are indeed incentivized to make broken products, they will may not produce open source products at all rendering the existence of open source plans useless, although the OP assumed the existence already. So yes in the event that we did have open source appliances planned obsolescence might be solved or reduced by your method, but the fact that planned obsolescence exists in the first place is a signal that manufacturers will never produce them if this is the case. It is then in effect almost (in this regard) the same as the OP saying "I wish manufactures would not implement planned obsolescence." A potential solution for the manufacturer would be to simply make the most expensive part be the most the one that breaks, or even better to pull an apple and solder everything together such that you can't ever fix it. Even if the latest apple laptops were completely open source you wouldn't be able to upgrade many aspects of it. My point here is that if we start from the point of assuming manufactures will implement planned obsolescence then they will continue using it. Which is why the GP suggested that via 3d printing the user become the manufacturer or to do so with small scale manufacturing, which as I pointed out comes with increased cost and safety concerns.

>and download a manual that tells me how to fix everything that goes wrong with it.

Open source doesn't automatically suggest a manual and closed source doesn't automatically suggest no manual (as someone else pointed out, manuals used to be more common). That said, the chances of there being a manual for an open source appliance are probably very high if there are enough users or if the creators cared to document it. And of course if you can read the source than open source in fact does imply a manual, but at greater cost (which still is better than nothing of course). Either way I think my above point stands that if we assume manufacturers are implementing planned obsolescence (which the OP assumes) and if we assume that open source would solve planned obsolescence, then we have no choice but to conclude that no manufactures will make open source products. The exception being if its so difficult that only a small number of users will actually be able to repair the product or could only do so at a high cost. In which case there would be a small segment of people who would benefit. But that severely limits the statement of the OP, which is totally fine, just something to take note of.

there are people who forge metal by hand for a living, and they are better at it than average javasctipt developer is at 'hackibg things together'

Unironically yes. Handmade does not mean "hacked together". Airplanes are handmade. My dinner is handmade.

In my view you are defining two types of handmade here. Dinner can be handmade of course, but from an evolutionary perspective this is necessarily true. I would put this into its own category given how fundamental it is. But aside from that, just from a basic perspective, dinner is very simple to make, and the ingredients are standardized by nature itself; that is, there cannot be any incompatibility between two foods. So the parts are extremely simple and the building process even simpler. And there are minimal safety concerns. Although from a quick search I found the following:

>CDC estimates 48 million people get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases each year in the United States.

I don't know what to conclude from this, but it doesn't matter anyway. The reason being that we cannot compare making dinner to making a blender. This is obvious from my evolutionary perspective given above but also from direct observation. The ingredients of a blender are much more specialized. Size matters, quality matters, and it all has to fit together. I'd compare it to a Linux based OS actually. Most people need someone to package all the utilities together (and provide support, but lets ignore that). Except hardware of course does not scale in this way. You need to repeat the process each time. The is the problem that factories solve: securing supply, putting it together, and all this at scale. In regards to the airplane example, the definition of handmade is vastly changed, or at least the type of handmade has changed. Now there are government regulators, extremely specific and expensive machines (some of which I assume are in house), highly skilled engineers and billions of dollars at work. The only reason we aren't using factories is because we can't (I'm taking your word for it, I don't know). Unless you are referring to smaller planes, which maybe don't have all this involved (I don't know anything about this either). But at the very least they have a few skilled engineers and a lot of tools. We can't use these engineers to make blenders and washing machines, it just cannot scale. There need to be billions of these things. Maybe a few thousand can afford this, but now we have lost our engineers to less important problems.

This said, you never directly suggested we do this at scale. Only that you would like if possible.

If every part is standardized to the point of commodification (competing exclusively on price and quality) and it's assembled by a local store whose asset is their reputation, then it becomes hard to defect on any given part because it will just get swapped out.

Similarly if our open source blender is made of 'electric motor' and 'belt' and 'brass gears' and it will be repaired rather than causing a repeat customer when it breaks, then the nash equilibrium becomes producing an okay product for a decent price, not a mostly-good one for the same price which will break.

Open schematics for electronics, parts blueprints for mechanical components. Anything with code/firmware should also have open sourced code with related toolchain to program it either freely available or open sourced too.

This is not that hard to do, a lot of older appliances already do it all.

One solution is the hire a factory to build the product to spec. Here we can deal with planned obsolescence by raising consumer awareness about a given blueprint, so that they know to buy the right spec. That sounds a lot like HDMI, which has no shortage of low quality implementations. now that's not a perfect comparison because HDMI is only one part of the cable and I don't know how much needs to be verified to qualify but ignoring that there is another issue of simply uncertified products altogether taking advantage of the name to sell worse quality products. And this leads me to my last point which is that it may not be feasible to have a standard like HDMI for appliances like a blender. The reason HDMI exists at all is not because of quality per se but because devices need to work together. So what results of this in my opinion is that there are a lot of (too many?) prerequisites to solving planned obsolescence, definitely more than just publishing the plans.

edit: And I don't mean that everyone uses the same type of clothes iron, I mean that the type of clothes iron you use isn't tied to a particular manufacturer.

In terms of mass sales, yes a manufacturer would have to make it. But multiple manufacturers could and they may not "cheap out for obsolescence sake" in the same way. And if they do, a person has the option to make it themselves - whether or not it makes economic sense.

This is still better than the current situation where the customer has to pay money, cross fingers and hope.

A lot of old jeeps used to have PTO ports on the transfer case, so you could use the jeep engine to power machinery. I suppose you could do the same thing with modern vehicles, at the cost of some mechanical complexity.

A more interesting option on EVs would be a big switch to disconnect the 3-phase AC motor from the motor controller, and route the power to an external plug with three conductors and some sort of control interface. The idea would be to use the car's motor controller as a programmable power supply for just about anything. You could have it generate normal 50 or 60 hz AC power (single phase, double phase, or 3-phase) at any voltage up to the pack voltage, or it could supply DC, or it could act as the power supply for an arc welder, or it could act as a motor controller for just about any kind of motor (with the control interface used to update the motor controller on the motor position, for motors that require that sort of thing).

There's this problem generally with electrically-powered devices like electric lawn mowers and chain saws, that they're limited to about 2 horsepower because that's about the limit of what you can send over a 15-20 amp circuit at 115v AC. 220V AC gives you more power for things like big table saws, but there isn't really a standard for 220v household extension cords, as far as I know. But a typical EV motor controller (or the battery directly) can supply hundreds of horsepower worth of electrical energy. It's kind of scary, actually, when you think about it. You could power a lot of stuff with that, if we just had interconnection standards.

Well, there is there in the rest of the world, outside of North America. Most of the power plugs are 220v-240v @ 10-16 amp (depending on country, plug, etc).

Picking an existing standard would work here I think.

To your point, however, this is just a stopgap b/c a) it requires an expensive inverter that is otherwise completely useless on the truck and b) the power is still somewhat limited. As a result, there's not much incentive for a manufacturer to create high power electric tools that could take advantage of this ability because the market is extremely limited.

It does seem like something that will naturally evolve, however. I'm looking forward to a nice electric log splitter that actually has some guts.

That said, there are standards for powering devices. Usually generators, which generally work from 110/20amp 110/30 amp locking and sometimes 220/50 amp

https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/

"LifeTrac is a low-cost, multipurpose open source tractor. It serves as a workhorse backbone for many of GVCS technologies. We are currently on the 7th prototype – see LifeTrac Genealogy.

The highlight of our design is that it is a modular design that allows for a high degree of modification and flexibility – such as scalable frames, interchangeable power units, quick connect wheel drive, and plug-and-play hydraulic power that allows for a driver and remote."

For someone hanging out on hackernews with the name Christensen, I imagine you would have stumbled upon The Innovator's Dilemma by now.

Tiny competitors disrupting established incumbents by playing a different game that is fundamentally incompatible with the incumbents' business model is the very story of tech disruption.

Someone could disrupt with a small scale competitor, but the place to start wouldn't look like a go-kart, it would look like this [1] 50-150 HP range, probably without a cab, with appropriate standard hitches, hydraulics, PTO, etc. You could learn lessons and scale from there. The couple of open source farming tractor things I've seen have been cute, but just not anything like what would actually compete, and there's no reason not to start with something that at least is in range.

1. https://www.caseih.com/northamerica/en-us/products/tractors/...

If the go kart tractor allows experimentation with automation and presently difficult to automate farming methods or crops then it may be viable.

It won't compete with the ten hectares of wheat needed for one person to earn a living wage even without other costs, but there might be a niche for produce rather than calorie crops that looks like 1000 gardens rather than a vast ocean of corn.

Edit: Opened your link to the rather small tractors, this is what I had in mind with the one in the article being more along the lines of what the reprap was in the 2000s compared to a ratrig now.

I've been hearing much more lately about how crude our approach to farming/agriculture is and how counterproductive current methods are. No-till, carbon farming, cover crops, etc. which spend more effort in creating a balanced ecosystem where crops are incorporated versus placing product, extracting value, leaving nutrient deficient earth behind.

There's an interesting documentary called Biggest Little Farm where a couple tries to strike that balance although not focused on tech/automation. This article bringing in the resourcefulness and ingenuity of farmers with tech alongside that balanced ecosystem has worldwide impact.

Where are you getting your information from? Certainly not from modern farmers.

Crude as in there are many forms of existing processes we have inherited and continue on. No different than any other industry but this one has been linked to profound impacts on a multitude of outcomes that affect many in more immediate ways.

I like it!