Replacement With Electronic Controllers
While still fairly popular, cam timers are mechanical and hence subject to wear and reliability problems. Their reliability record remains good, but there is always some failure rate with mechanical switch contacts.
Electronic controllers have largely replaced cam timers for most applications, primarily to reduce costs, and also to maximise product features.
Cam timers don't have the greater degree of flexibility that CPU-based controllers provide. As well as offering more wash program variations, a cpu based washing machine controller can automatically initiate test cycles, reducing manufacturing costs, and provide fault codes in the field, again reducing repair costs, and providing feedback on real world failure rates and causes. All of these reduce manufacture and business costs.
Read more about this topic: Cam Timer
Famous quotes containing the words replacement and/or electronic:
“Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old- fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.”
—J.G. (James Graham)