The owner of a 2014 Samsung WW10H9400EW "Crystal Blue" washer has brought back remote control of the machine after Samsung ended support for its old Smart Control feature. The open-source project went up on GitHub on 24 October 2026, and the story spread after its author, McArhony, described it on Reddit. Tech sites picked it up over the following days, among them the Polish site Antyweb on 27 October. According to those reports, the author built it with the help of Anthropic's Claude in about two hours.

What the project does

The core is a SmartThings Edge driver that talks to the washer directly over the home network, with no Samsung cloud involved. It runs on a SmartThings hub that supports Edge drivers: Hub v2 or v3, Aeotec Smart Home Hub, ThingsOne, or a recent Samsung TV with a built-in hub. The author uses a 2025 The Frame TV. In the SmartThings app the washer shows its state, phase and remaining time, and can be started, paused and cancelled. The programme, temperature, spin speed, rinses, auto dispenser, child lock and maintenance alerts are also available. According to Antyweb, the washer also works together with the author's connected dryer again.

The repository includes a samsung-washer command line tool for finding and testing the washer. A Homebridge plugin for Apple Home is listed as work in progress, so far with only state, remaining time, start and pause.

An undocumented local protocol

The author documented how the washer talks. It listens only on TCP port 2878, over TLS, and sends one-line XML messages starting with "DRC-1.00". It accepts only clients that present Samsung's public AC14K_M certificate, known from the company's air conditioners. The setup downloads the certificate from another project, and the repository does not include it. Pairing works with a token: you briefly turn Smart Control off and on at the washer. Washers from about 2016-2018 use a different protocol, JSON over HTTPS on port 8888, which the driver does not support yet.

Limits

  • Only the WW10H9400EW has been tested. Other washers from 2013-2015 should work, but with a different programme list.
  • Smart Control has to be on for any remote change, and it locks the touch screen while it is on. A washer that is switched off drops off Wi-Fi and cannot be turned on remotely.
  • The washer must already be on Wi-Fi. It was set up with Samsung's old app, and there is currently no known way to connect one that never was.
  • The author warns never to hold the Smart Control button until "AP" appears: the washer would leave the Wi-Fi, possibly for good.

Why it matters

The project is a small example of what happens when a manufacturer ends support while the hardware still works. Smart features of a washing machine depended on an app and a cloud service, and the device itself could do the same over the local network all along. The project is unofficial and not affiliated with Samsung. It is released under the MIT licence.