Refrigerate in peace, OpenFridge.
The hardware OpenFridge was controlling is no more. It now looks like this:
Obviously, it should not look like this. What follows is a post-mortem,
because it is worth learning from one’s mistakes.
The final moments of a fridge
After fixing the defrost I did
not get around to replacing the blown thermal fuse. The Chinese sensors were
supplied with some kind of wire which breaks if you so much as look at it, and I
was afraid I would knock the wire at some point and crash the system. Two
nights ago, putting something in the fridge, I knocked one block and wondered if
I had indeed snapped the wire—but I didn’t look. Last night my wife
complained that the fridge was ‘melting’, at which point I assumed the sensor
had indeed failed, and the fridge had used stale data and failed to cool. No,
she meant the fridge was melting, or more specifically the freezer: the
plastic has melted, flown down into the heat exchange, and then fused in situ.
The whole thing is now one lump and cannot be separated.
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