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Cooking Up the Connected Kitchen
Esther Schindler writes "If you're looking for technology to improve kitchen connectivity and home automation, you might be surprised at how little is available today. Turns out, that's a good thing. Our industry has a long history of trying to sell a solution in search of a problem. Maybe we can get away with that occasionally, when the solution is inherently fun, or when there are enough of us geeks to buy an cool-looking automated gizmo with blinking lights where a cheaper hand-held "solution" is just as good for the masses. But when it comes to home appliances, which cost a pretty penny by anyone's measure, nobody wants to invest big bucks in a "connected" device — however cool the home automation seems — where the technology platform goes away (my washing machine is 8 years old; I sure wouldn't use a PC or phone that age) or where the benefits are murky. That is, just what is it we want the kitchen automation to do? It's one thing to say, "The fridge could order food when I run out" but none of us want to scan every potato as we unload the groceries. Yet, as I wrote in Cooking up the connected kitchen, the manufacturers are paying attention to home automation and connectivity and giving your oven an app. And some of it, as I hope the article makes clear, is really cool. 'The manufacturers want to sell us technology, and we want to buy cool capabilities that actually improve the quality of our lives. What I found surprising, in my own hands-on evaluations, is how often I had a dual-stage response: "That's the dumbest thing I ever saw. (beat) Wait, I want that!"' The manufacturers are being thoughtful about both what we'd want and what we'd buy... which is something to appreciate. So what would you want from kitchen connectivity?"
I want it to still work in ten years.
Connectivity is great but I want automation. I want to be able to wake up to a couple perfectly fried eggs and some bacon next to buttered toast. Thanks science.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Almost any kitchen-centric automation is more of a pain to implement or maintain for home users than it would be worth.
Really the only thing useful would be a device to keep the recipe I googled close at hand... oh look a tablet!
If what you want is to check your email, browse the web a bit, or make a call then PCs and phones of that age are just fine. And are very greatly preferred over having no PC and/or no phone.
Having a non-connected stove/over and a non-connected fridge is much better than eating your food cold before it rots.
And, as you can attest, having an eight year old washer is much better than dragging your laundry to the riverbank and beating it on rocks.
New is not always improved; old is usually better than nothing.
Just fsck off, marketing drones.
I'd like the refrigerator to send me a notification when it's not maintaining a cold enough temperature.
I'd like to be able to start a preheat cycle on the oven remotely. I'd like remote notifications (smartphone?) when the oven timer is about to go off (T-5minutes?). It might be nice to enter a more complicated cooking program via a smarter interface, but I'm not sure if I want that on the oven, or on a remote control device.
I'd like remote notifications when the dishwasher, washer and dryer cycles complete.
Beyond that, no. I'll use a tablet if I want to look up recipes, or how to get out grass stains.
I want feedback.
I want to be able to stick a thermometer in my food, whether in the oven, microwave or on the hob and have the thing use feedback to follow a temperature vs. time profile.
Why waste $5k on immersion heaters and vacuum packers for sous vide setups when a simple thermometer input and a few lines of code could achieve the same thing on a conventional kitchen oven?
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There are good remote thermometers. Combine one with a microwave oven so that it scans your food, and dials back the power if hot spots occur, and stops cooking when a predetermined temperature reached.
Plus, a pot stirring robot. Just put a spoon in the robot's hand, grab the arm and show it how to stir the pot. Then tell it to repeat the action. Bonus points if the spoon has a thermometer in it to alert you to your pudding boiling.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I just bought a new refrigerator. I had the option of getting the model with the touchscreen interface above the icemaker. However, the equivalent model without the touchscreen was on sale for $700 less. For that money, I can buy a couple Kindle Fire's with money to spare. I just can't justify the added cost, along with the contradictory long-life appliance, short life tech device.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
I want a fridge to notice my mom hasn't opened it in 3 days. If she's not on vacation and the indoor drone finds her vital signs are not responsive
then the fridge should summon dexter, roomba and big dog to put her in the fridge until the coroner arrives. It what she would have wanted...
nothing is going to put the food in the oven for you
That's the problem.
It's quite solveable. There are many automated industrial food processing facilities. In Japan, there's a whole range of vending machines which automatically make pizzas, french fries, etc.
A refrigerator/microwave combination, where items go in standard trays and a suitable mechanism conveys trays into the microwave and out, wouldn't be that hard. Parents could phone in dinner for their kids.
I want my grandmother to be able to visit and use my appliance without "technical support". I want to be able to show my 7 year old how to use it (consistent with safety and supervision of course).
Qeo is a framework which exactly intends to bridge all kind of connected home ecosystems.
Check it out at http://www.i-speak-qeo.com/
Technicolor already has signed contracts with many big industry players so looks very promising.
this guy gave a talk about it on 29C3 a moth ago http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDx75KTG8h0
Actually, having remote access to an inventory is a killer application. Of course, we don't want to scan every item added or used up. The implementation is the problem. RFID might be a solution, though it isn't cost-effective at this time, and more importantly, RFID tags won't be attached to single eggs or pieces of broccoli in my fridge. A simple webcam in the fridge might go along way (the devil is in the details - light - positioning?), but it wouldn't capture the pantry or the spice rack... "When did I last buy X?" might be a pretty good proxy for all of this, without all the kitchen technology.
Nothing ruins a movie night faster than overcooked or burnt food. Give me a way to have a reminder to check the pizza I'm baking pop up on my TV screen, laptop, phone, etc, for example. I can't hear the timer alarm from my home theater, let alone while I've got a movie playing at normal volume.
I don't have time to run an app on my phone and set a timer and name the timer when I've already set the machine that's doing the work.
Hell, give me an oven that will shut off and automatically start cycling in cool air from the room when the timer expires so my guests aren't stuck waiting for the food to cool to non-lethal temperatures.
Zigbee is pretty well established for this kind of stuff. The chips are cheap now. An extra $10 added to a $1000 range is kid stuff.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Not just in the kitchen, but especially in the bath. Is it so hard to make a "smart" tap where the termperature goes smoothly from "cold" to "hot", instead of constantly adjusting it manually because it goes "freezing freezing freezing freezing ok boilinglava boilinglava boilinglava" and the "ok" position shifts every couple of seconds. We have thermometers, why hasn't someone automated this yet?
Showing the actual temperature would also be a plus.
anecdote: i saw a father/son duo at a scrap metal yard, and they were unloading an old stove. we started talking so here's the story..... Grandma was leaving the oven/stove on. the situation was deemed too dangerous by her relatives. initially, the plan was to leave her without the appliance, until the grandson gave them the idea of connectivity. now they can control Grandma's stove with a smartphone. Profit! (but pricey)
A little lozenge shaped device with a washable surface, a high temp capable battery, and an 800 degree silicone o-ring seal that I can put in with what I'm cooking, and it will broadcast the temperature of its surroundings. -also a flat one for a grill or an oven rack -also a receiver that converts the transmission to a big display and to Bluetooth or NMEA 0183 or wifi or something Teaching heating or cooling devices to respond to the temperature of the food will be much easier once there's wireless thermometers and a standardized communication method for them. (OK, 37 proprietary communication methods for several years until whichever one the EU mandates becomes the de-facto standard)
I don't want a refrigerator that orders food when I'm running low. The definitions of how low is too low and what food I want to order are just too fuzzy and variable.
But, I'd want the refrigerator to be able to tell me what the temperature in the compartments is, whether the door's open or closed, that sort of thing. And maybe send an alert to my phone or via e-mail or to a system tray app if the door stays open too long (somebody forgot to close it right) or the temperature goes above what I've set it for and stays there (something's wrong and the food's thawing). And of course the basic warning app that alerts me if it isn't getting reports from the refrigerator (as in a power outage) and I need to see whether it's just the network out or something more major I have to do something about. Ditto for the oven: fancy automatic cooking is a big no, but being able to see what burners/ovens are on/off, what the oven temperature is, how long it's been on, and control those things remotely, that might be nice. Or the dishwasher: when was it started, has it finished running, is it's door closed.
Of course the big problem is security. I may want to see and control my appliances, but I don't want anybody outside the household (and maybe not even everybody inside the household) doing the same. To me this stuff falls into the SCADA category, things that while they may be networked they should not be on a public network. Wireless for instance would be right out. And wouldn't be needed anyway. Appliances need wiring right from the start, for power and gas and water. So include Ethernet wiring with the runs and bring it all to a central switch where it can be connected to the home network. If I were doing it I'd actually place it on a third network interface in the router, one dedicated only to home automation that could be accessed by the other local networks but was blocked from the WAN interface.
I suspect I should worry that my standard requirement for a router is 4 network interfaces.
The basic idea being that if I'm cooking something I can use my smartphone or tablet to log into the oven and see a live image of the food inside the oven without the need to walk over to the oven and peer inside.
or where the benefits are murky
Ah, yes. The benefits, elusive (and illusive) though they may be. "Controlling" your fridge or your thermostat from far away via your cellphone. Useful? Hardly at all. Cool and shiny? Sure, that's why people buy them. You need almost none of this. You don't even need a "food processor," unless you have to prepare food for more than 4 or 5 people. A set of decent knives and cutting boards will do just fine.
Just be realistic and recognize that if you buy kitchen gizmos it is because you are a gadget freak, not because they serve any compelling useful purpose. They are, by and large, paraphernalia, not tools.
Don't worry. The new ones will be made out of cardboard and 100% "recycleable" so you will be able to get an new one every two years while remaining smugly green. Of course, you'll have to get a new one every two years as that's as long as they'll last, but the new ones will be better anyway. They'll have rounder corners. And they'll be even greener.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This probably has something to do with enjoying cooking, so for me there's very little incentive to automate more than we already do. I mean, we have gadgets to:
- chop just about anything quickly
- slice just about anything quickly
- peel vegetables
- open cans really easily
- time absolutely everything
- clean the dishes afterwords
- turn the oven on while you're not even in the house so that the casserole will be finished just as you're getting home
What's left that isn't better handled by people?
I am officially gone from
If we go by how network security in various appliances has been applied this far a connected kitchen will be a time-bomb in the making. What if e.g. someone can turn your oven on at max while you're not at home? Or turn off your fridge, melting all your groceries there? Turn on the faucet and just let the water roll? Alas, if the recent history is any indication these things will have either no security or minimal security with hard-coded access tokens and unupgradeable firmware.
Yes, it would be awesome of have a fridge that can keep track of all the food in it, but the problem is that we all don't just buy food with barcodes on it. So sure, add a camera to the fridge to it sees the potatoes you add to it, but then you still have to run your food going in and out past a camera for it to recognize what you are taking in and out of it. So put 20 cameras in the thing, but I can easily see situations where the camera is not going to see all things at all times. Also how to track content in jars and containers. What if you have a jar of mayo that was used to store some home-made pickles?
The reality is that total automation in the kitchen may be a problem set that is just too difficult to invent. Nobody wants to program a fridge. Nobody wants to have to scan every item, weight it, etc just to have a quick snack. And of course lets not forget that food is not only stored in the fridge, you want every cupboard equipped with this technology, whether it stores food or not? I don't want my kitchen to cost $100k just for the simplicity of food arriving at my door step when I run out.
While I think there are lots of areas where home automation can be improved dramatically, I just got the Nest thermostat and absolutely love I can change the temperature when I am in my rec-room in the basement without having to go upstairs, there are many fantasies that just will never be solved due to the incredibly large amount of complexity involved to engineer a solution that we consider incredibly mundane, like knowing when to buy a new jar of mayonnaise.
Some things just don't have a solution to them.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
is the order of the day. Food has to be ordered online. Kitchenware is not at home anymore, but in an Italian, Chinese or other canteen kitchen cloud," the Estate Agent says: http://www.heise.de/ct/schlagseite/2010/11/gross.jpg
...an NTP client on every appliance with a clock display. I'm OCD about my clocks being in sync. (but hate setting them)
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
Appliances with an actual published API usable from within my LAN only would be good. I absolutely positively do not want appliances using 'the cloud'. I do not want recipes from their proprietary server, I do not want to order food from their approved vendor, I do not want to log in to their oh so special server on the web. Ideally, it should be upgradable. I will NOT be in the market for new appliances 5 years later.
However, if that stuff is going to come with a 100% markup over the non-automated stuff, no sale.
I'd like a nice tablet for recipes, browsing, etc. Maybe a little easel so I can refer to it while I cook.
And oh yeah, it should be dishwasher safe.
I am not a crackpot.
So, the manufacturers are listening to what we want, eh? Meanwhile my one-year-old Chinese-made refrigerator (is there any other kind?) already has a problem with the defroster -- a simple, well-known process that has been around for at least 50 years. My previous refrigerator managed to last for 17 years without a major problem. I don't want a lot of bells and whistles, I just want simple appliances which will work for more than a couple of years.
Proverbs 21:19
This is about the money. The margins on a fridge or other appliance are thin. They have done all they can to make them cheap as possible, outsourced manufacturing, materials, and automation.
If your fridge texts you that the water filter must be replaced, and you replace it, that is almost pure profit. Plus, they did not have to advertise or get you into a store. Free money! Three new water filters is more profit for GE than a brand new fridge.
More of the appliances you buy will have disposable consumable parts. Also heading off consumer issues and getting routine maintenance done will be huge for the manufacturer.
They also want to collect usage and energy data. Don't know what they will use it for, but more data is better, right?
Simple answer: No. I have loved to cook since the time I was single digits old. I went to 3 years of Culinary school, but found out that I hated cooking at home after working with food all day. So I left culinary school for greener pastures and went to a tech job. At the same time, I'm back to enjoying cooking at home.
While technology can be great, at the same time.. not for food. There are so many variables to look at when cooking. How much butter I use in a saute will change on so many factors only the eyes and nose can catch differences. We are not talking a little either.
Kind of interesting, but I just shared this story with a guy I work with. Making Chicken with Marsala wine and artichokes. The amount of wine is always the same, chicken stock is the same amount, artichokes is roughly the same amount, but butter can go from 2-4Tbsp from one preparation to the next. If the umidity is low, the chicken is moist, the flower was dry, or air temperature was different, all of those things play a factor. Hell, the cooking time differs on items over the course of a day when the weather changes as does how high my flame is on the burner.
I'm not saying you could not build technology that could determine all of that and make adjustments. But why would I want to spend all that money and not do something I take great pride and pleasure in?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The oven that I can control from across the world -- the worst idea ever. Can I also have a way to control my fire extinguisher from across the world? Or to change the amount of time it takes for chicken to cook if I get stuck in traffic mid-way through the cooking?
I'd love cabinets that wash the dishes, but I don't want to put dirty dishes into my clean cabinets.
I actually would like a knife that teaches me advanced knifing skills. But a book can do that much more easily.
I really have zero interest in adding anything to my kitchen outside of things that cook, clean, or prep.
I'm not so much for the automation when it comes to the cooking part, that I like. The issue I have is pretty straightforward. My wife and I both like to cook, however since we have small children dinner tends to be a bit haphazard because of school/dance/etc.
Since I buy a majority of my food at a grocery store and since I already use one of discount cards... they're tracking all my purchases anyway... why not also send me an email in a format that I can parse as well?
Once I've got a database of the food I've got in my house it's not a hard problem to ask the question, "With these ingredients what different recipes can I make for this week?" Throw in some preferences for things like pizza, spegetti and meatballs, etc.
I envision a system where you'd intuitively come up with a weekly menu that would suggest some different stuff along with the usual suspects. Then on that day it could even send you a reminder to defrost certain stuff and when you should start cooking so the meal could be on the table at a certain time.
Celebrity chefs could even get in on the act and you could do a "Cook with [insert favority chef]" meal plan. For those people who don't know how to cook it could be a way for them to do a "Cooking with Julia" type instruction system where it would start with the basics and help the user build up skills. Roll in some instruction videos and tips and tricks type stuff. Obviously there'd have to be some advertisements, etc. to pay for the whole thing.
That would be interesting to me. A stove that can cook all by itself sounds like a tv dinner to me, that I don't want. What I do want is something that helps get me out of the rut of cooking the same meals over and over.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
It occurs to me that I don't use the food I have that efficiently. If I want to cook a specific recipe, I go out and get those ingredients. Sometimes I have leftover ingredients. Sometimes I wind up with random things I can't think of how to use until they go bad and I throw them away.
So a useful feature in my kitchen would be an engine that would know what ingredients I have and how much, and what yummy recipes I could make with them that night. Even better, have that engine suggest recipes based on my likes & dislikes the way that Pandora or Spotify or Netflix recommend new songs or movies based on your preferences. For bonus points, have the engine be able to figure out how to re-use the leftover pork ribs from two nights ago into a new and different recipe (that is not soup :-)
If not us, who? If not now, when?
Philips had a concept called Microbial Kitchen a while back which included lights powered by methane as well as a stove that burns methane generated by composting kitchen waste. Devising appliances that cleave to that closed loop philosophy would be great.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
One device... Food replicator. Great for meal & drink requests. Meal clean up is a breeze. It doesn't take up much space. And grocers will hate it.
Aerogarden is an appliance that grows fresh herbs on your countertop. It would be excellent to combine something like this with aquaponics so you can have a steady supply of both veg and fish in your kitchen. You can't be more of a locavore than that.
If not us, who? If not now, when?
the manufacturers are paying attention to home automation and connectivity and giving your oven an app.
I can't wait to try force-closing my oven! Yay, progress!
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
and hacker can be cooking a big gas explosion by turning the gas without firing the lighter.
With all that, it should be able to suggest different meals with what i have. This is the whole reason for all this.
Of course it could suggest an ingrediant here or there for something else, and of i likenthe suggestion, remind me when i use my app on my phone when im at the grocery store to check if i have eggs at home.
No half ass implementation please, i wouldnt have patience to configure anything or add app nto make it do what i want like these programs that pass for operating systems these days where operating the system is the last priority of their existence.
Oh, another unrelated kitchen wish would be a couple of robotic arms that would move along the back of the counter and pick up, clean, dry and put away all dirty dishes. Yes, no more dishwasher. Bonus points if i can throw the plate from the dining room table.
I would be willing to pay the amount of a new compact car for that last one.
an eigth years old washing mashine?
thats nothing. my mom got rid of her 50 years old Siemens washing machine. It wasn't broken, it just had a leaky pipe and was dump like bread.
Ok, it had its "flaws", e.g. it took 30-60 litres of water for washing. BUT the water could be reused or be taken from rain or other third grade water supplies. In fact if done right you could use the same 30 litres of rain water to wash 20 loads of clothes.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
All I really want is a way to sync all the clocks on all my appliances so they all display the same, correct, time. Nothing more than that.
Countertops that don't need to be protected from water, heat, or stains, can be easily resurfaced after scratching, and are designed to be hosed down and then squeegeed into the sinks. A refrigerator that has no interior surfaces that are awkward or difficult to clean. A freezer that is frost free without defrost cycles (laminar flow air curtain when the door opens?), cause I'd rather have frost than freezer burn. It would also have a -70C alcohol bath for flash freezing foods or just because I wanted the ice cubes for my whiskey damn cold. A range hood/HVAC system that while almost completely silent still manages to move air up to about 60 linear feet per minute across and up the back of the range. It would also pull in makeup air from a vent to the outside when outdoor temperatures make doing so appropriate, cannily avoid wasting heat in winter, and be easy to degrease.
I use my microwave oven all the time, and it's computerized, but the user interface sucks.
How about:
- a touchscreen interface
- never-ending reminder beeps that something finished and is still in the oven.
- allow the sounds to be changed
- require confirmation if you punch in > 10 minutes (did that once 30 minutes instead of 3, almost started a fire, smoke smell permeated in the house for weeks)
- smoke detector, arcing detector, boil-over detector
- temperature detector built-in (maybe alert you when the temperature dropped to non-scalding)
- make multi-stage stuff easier. Like if it needs to stand for 2 minutes, allow that to be easily added to the end before the alarm.
- notifications on my phone?
- custom recipes/presets
- scan the barcode for commercial frozen food to get cooking instructions, recalling your last settings for that food.
all this crap should NOT require an internet connection. (I can just see them trying to tie it into the manufacturer website)
http://xkcd.com/1109/
Having connectivity to such gadgets would be nice, both for monitoring and controlling. What I do not want is to either get trapped in some vendor's ecosystem in order to get any level of integration, or to have to deal with tons of apps, one for each gadget. Similar to devices on the PC, there should be an abstraction level between the device's controlling interface, and the programs for accessing the devices. I think any vendor who did a "first mover" step into that space, offering control over their devices at an API level, would have a nice advantage, in terms of going towards where the market will likely eventually end up.
That, plus it needs to have integrated WLAN (don't want the hassle of setting up additional networking technologies in the home), plus of course some reasonable authentication mechanism.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned a webcam in your oven, so you can monitor the brown-ness of anything that's baking over any browser. We visit the oven repeatedly, checking to see if our dishes have reached the optimal level of caramelization. It's also hard to see through the window, so we have to open the door to check, releasing heat. A camera would save trips to the kitchen, and having to open the door for a clear view.
My stove has dials. They control the gas flow. It also has a timer, which screams at me when times have ended. The "Smart" in any kitchen appliance should be the user. Frankly, if my washer or stove required a "configuration UI" I would not want it, and I certainly would not want to have to have a smart phone to turn on the goddamn microwave.