Patent Application
20190372800
The invention generally relates to the operation of home appliances.
There are many home appliances today. Typically they all have switched to turn them on and off and also switches and buttons to change the mode of operation an appliance operation. A refrigerator has such switched to change its operation temperature and an air conditioner has such a switch to choose between heating and cooling. There are appliance sensors which detect when a door is opened or a press is made by a person. Small children or elderly dementing people left alone may press a switch or open a door by mistake. Also all other people may do such an action like turning on the heater in the summer time by mistake.
For religious Jews there is a specific problem—they are not allowed to do any action which will cause an electric activity during the Sabbath.
Two Israeli patent 236214 and 223236 are offering solutions. 236214 is describing a system where using software control false activations will be disregarded and 223236 describes a system where using switches/relays,
However, both require intervening with existing appliances where the needs may not be justified,
The invention is about having an apparatus which is serving as an accessory to the appliance which can force on the control lines coming from the appliance switches s and sensors and going in the appliance control board a desired voltage value regardless of the values put by the appliance switches or sensors. This can be done without any switches/relays by using low impedance drivers. The driving will be done at a specific timing and will be kept for a certain time frame this can be a specific date and time of the day and a duration of days hours and minutes. The forced value can be a known desired value or the sampled value at the beginning of a time frame. The timing can be controlled by a remote controller, which will allow easy control of the lines to be forces and the timing.
Under the new invention, Protection accessory appliance 11 will receive these control lines and would output forcing lines 17 with appropriate e values. They will join the control lines 16 going to the appliance control board. This will force the control lines 16 to receive the voltage values coming from the apparatus instead of the values coning from sensor/switches and the lines coming in ADC 14 will have the values coming from the apparatus 21 and not from switches 12 or sensors 13, this is during the period of time the apparatus is driving the lines.
The impact of a selected time frame is that sampling will be done at the beginning of it and driving line with this value though the time frame.
The timing can be pre-programmed per appliance usage—e.g. Jewish Sabbath and holiday time or summer time. Or this can be a switch the mother is pressing when she leaves home. Potentially, this can be put under the control of a remote controller, which can be a smart phone with an application, any home computing device, internet communication or any device with a wireless communication which can have an appliance control application, which will select the switches/sensors it wishes to control and under what timing and time frame.
The advantage of the described invention is that the installation inside an appliance is very easy. The apparatus will have to be packaged as an accessory in the appliance or close to it with wiring to it.
