Comment by Legend2440
5 hours ago
The trouble is that 'smart fridges' turn out to be just a regular fridge with an android tablet on the front. Which is useless.
I would love a fridge with a camera inside and a smart enough AI to tell me (1. what's in the fridge (2. how long it's been there and (3. what I've eaten from it. Some companies have tried making this kind of fridge, but AFAIK they don't work very well.
Maybe some fridges have cameras with object detection and can tell you what % your milk remains, but this one does not do any of that.
Features that are smart listed on the product page[1]:
Family Hub™ 21.5”: Family Hub™ keeps your family connected from anywhere; search recipes, share pictures, stream music, access YouTube and control your smart devices all from your the fridge* (*A WiFi connection and Samsung account required)
SmartThings Energy: SmartThings lets you monitor and manage your smart refrigerator's power usage; get energy saving tips and alerts to help lower your electric bill all from your phone.
Now Brief: The Now Brief provides a daily overview of information including the weather, your schedule and latest health data on your Family Hub ™screen, when it's not in use; customize your Now Brief dashboard using your favorite apps and widgets to get a quick glance of what's relevant to you.
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Samsung-30-cu-ft-Smart-French-Door-...
Extremely uncompelling stuff. Now add in that it is probably beaming your usage habits for your ad profile, always listening for voice commands, and apparently will break into freezing mode, and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider this. If they were giving them out for free or paying people to put in their house, their existence would make sense tp me. Now I've learned that n>1 people paid multiple thousands of dollars for this and I assume it is not the only model out there.
I'm not sure how any of that is actionable. I already know how to make my fridge more efficient - but if I knew how to get my kids to close the door instead of leaving it open while the pour their milk (on the other side of the kitchen) I'd do that.
I get mail from my utility that I use more electric than average. However that doesn't give me anything actionable to do about it. I don't need another nag about things I can't do anything about.
I’m still on the fence about closing the door for a short task like pouring milk. My understanding from the physics of opening the door, you’re mostly already replacing all the air in the fridge with air from outside the fridge. So convection already did its job of robbing your fridge of cold. Closing the door to open it again a minute later just gives you a second convection inducing action for air that might have been trapped the first time.
I would love to see someone at the level of technology connections do a breakdown of the physics here, and where the likely crossover point point is for different kinds of fridges. My current (probably illformed) belief from the suction and imagined resulting air exchange of all the fridges I’ve lived with is that leaving the fridge open on the order of seconds is better than opening-closing-opening-closing in terms of cold loss.
You’re only losing cold air, which has very little mass compared to what you’re actually storing in your fridge. The energy cost to re-chill the air in the unoccupied volume of your fridge can’t be that significant, I’d imagine.
It’s be an interesting experiment to put a temperature probe in something like a block of cheese, let it cool to the ambient fridge temperature, then open the fridge door for a few minutes and see if the temperature of the cheese even measurably changes over the next few hours or whatever amount of time.
its not
A simple tablet holder on the fridge door would do this way better.
> get energy saving tips
Here's a tip to save some electricity on the fridge: unplug all the smart stuff.
A fridge only uses a couple kWh a day and there's not much to optimize other than "keep the door closed" and "don't overfill it".
Just about the only thing I might want to see on a smart fridge door is maybe a shared family calendar that can sync with an external calendar provider, and that's not even listed as a feature.
> fridge with a camera inside
What they don't tell you: when the fridge door is closed the light turns off.
(yes HN this is a joke)
More seriously, in a previous job I did inventory/POS systems for pubs which would track the obvious things like "you got ten casks of beer delivered this morning and have sold 50 pints, at what point do you need to order more beer". It would genuinely be useful to have inventory tracking for fridges. At one point this would rely on barcodes, but machine vision should be good enough for now. The problem is, as with many smart things, it needs to be reliable and frictionless enough that it's better than just the Mark 1 Eyeball.
Also it's very difficult to trust if it might end up integrated into a purchase system. Does "you always have milk in the fridge" sound good? Yes. Is it going to be like "HP Instant Ink", a massive and slightly wasteful ripoff? Well, quite possibly.
Well the camera only needs to work while the door is open. Stuff isn't going to magically appear/disappear while the door is closed.
Or turn the light on for a bit when the camera is checking things.
The state maybe change however. Would be nice to hear mold has grown on an item at the back of shelf 4.
Why not just open the door and have a look in the fridge?
Not the person you asked but I can answer that from my perspective:
I am always on the lookout to automatate as much boring, everyday tasks. A Smart Fridge like that would allow you to generate shopping lists and reduce food waste by alerting you to possible soon-to-be-spoiled food.
A bit like what roombas are doing for cleaning. You still need to do it yourself a bit, but they help.
Not necessary, not even a gamechanger but another neat home automation. Would be nice, sad to hear they don't work well.
We need smart pantries to fully realize the “auto shopping list”, though… so a smart fridge is a half solution at best.
I even store produce (ex onions) on the counter tops, so I guess smart counters as well
10 replies →
Your enthusiasm is catching. I’m not sure I would ever consider a fridge with a built in camera though because of the bad manufacturer incentives. Maybe you could find a wireless camera that you put inside and the fridge related processing - the real point - is done somewhere else?
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That does nothing to solve my real problem, which is too little surveillance.
Because you are at the supermarket trying to remember what you have at home.
I always just want to know how much of X or Y is on hand when I’m physically out and at the grocer. You can just buy another but that usually leads to folks storing 5 bottles of ketchup or whatever
...while I'm at the grocery store on my way home from work?
1. Look in fridge before work 2. Add any missing items to shopping list 3. Reference said list on the way home from work
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I'm biased working for an online grocer, but isn't the problem really that you are in a store making the decision instead of in your kitchen at home? Half the goods I buy anyways aren't in a fridge, so a smart fridge only solves parts of the problem.
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Everyone is arguing over a feature that this fridge does not have.
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makes me wonder maybe if NFC/RFID strips were cheap enough you could have all the items tagged in the house and your phone could tell you what you have.. but probably causes e-waste though
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Why not do the more labor intensive, higher energy use, higher friction, less convenient version of anything? Why automate anything?
Why the blind insistence upon automating everything?
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Yes! I've been thinking about placing a tiny camera in the fridge for such a long time. This is especially important if you have a summer house or another apartment — you never know/remember what is in the fridge.
Taking photos of the fridge is a solution, but then phones were too stupid until recently to be able to find those. Even know it's a mixed bag.
We live in a world of dumb devices that could be so much smarter.
I just open the fridge and look. It's not an onerous task.
My idea of a smart fridge: a fridge with Zigbee Temp/Humidity sensor connected to my Home Assistant automation system that alerts me if things get out of whack.
My idea of a dumb fridge: a fridge that updates firmware, bricks itself, and lets all my food spoil.
You can get a Zigbee temp/humidity sensor and throw it inside the fridge.
This wouldn't work in today's environment because any engineering capacity won't be directed towards making the thing useful when Samsung or whoever can sell the inside of your fridge in return for "recommended products".
They have started trying it when the problem was much more difficult than it is now. I think a fridge that does this itinerary well is not too far away.
It would be nice if that was all they were, but evidently a software update can render the fridge unable to run, so it is clearly much more. These things have transitioned from IT to OT.
Why does it have to be a camera? Surely there are other sensors in this age of untethered innovation that could apply. Give me a "smart nose" that will explain whether the unusual smell is coming from the vegetable drawer, dairy section, or no man's land in the back of the top shelf. Give me a top-of-the-line thermometer that can warn me if leftovers are going into the fridge too hot.
These sound useful but hard. Putting a tablet on the front sounds easy but adds no value. Guess which one they picked? Apparently people will still buy.
Why do you want that? Generations of humans have existed just fine with modern refrigeration without any of these extra... What you would call features and I would call simple bullshit.
Why? Just open the door and look in it.
The trouble here is that this smart fridge put safety-critical features behind a single internet-connected piece of shit. Appliance manufacturers really need to take inspiration from automotive manufacturers in terms of redundancy and localizing failure.
I hate to break it to you, but those guy's aren't far behind on the path of enshittification.
Remember this classic? https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
You break nothing much, don't worry - I was taking about equipment failure or malfunction, not targeted attack. Like, your power brakes or ABS can fail but you can still brake. Power steering can fail but you can still steer. Hell, steering wheel can pop right off and the steering geometry should still try to relatively prefer the center (not always ideal, but like, better than going fully insane like a shopping cart wheel). My point is there's no single CPU executing the entire vehicle where any malfunction can spontaneously cause the entire vehicle to stop functioning so badly that it won't perform any of its duties. Sure an ECU could fail and not run the engine, but that won't make you lose the ability to brake or steer if it happens in the middle of a highway. Something malicious can still command the rest of the vehicle to stop functioning one by one, but there aren't many single sources of that much failure.
At the very least, the system that maintains the temperature of the fridge (critical for food safety) should not be brought down by an exception in the system that displays advertisements on the front panel...
Maybe they were testing spoiled food detection /s