projects:fridgehack:writeup

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This story begins with some fridges that had been returned to the retailer for various reasons.
The fridges are Brass Monkey branded and they are retailed through Jaycar Electronics, an Australian
electronics retailer, as well as RTM (Road, Traffic and Marine), an Australian outdoors retailer.
RTM happens to be owned by Jaycar Electronics. The two retailers share some other products between them,
but that's neither here nor there.

Because Jaycar stores couldn't feasibly return the 'dead' fridges to their head office in Rydalmere,
they opted instead to just keep them lying around at their stores taking up space. At some point the
manager got fed up with this arrangement and decided to just leave them outside the shop overnight.
Before doing that however, they irreversibly removed the controller/displays, assuming this would
render them 'unserviceable'.

Enter the crafty sales assistants.

After finding the data sheet for the compressor controllers, it was discovered that the compressors
are low voltage 3 phase units. They have a controller on the side of the compressor body that houses
all the smarts to make it work. It turns out that the displays are nothing more than a thermostat controller.
A simple way to choose set points and so forth.

The data sheet showed us that by bridging to pins, 'C' and 'T', we could call for the compressor to start.

  • projects/fridgehack/writeup.1654664873.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2022/06/08 15:07
  • by spsmith