Yes, Cooking Pots Can Run Doom

Internet of Things gadgets take a lot of flak, and some of it is well deserved. It’s hard to understand why a coffee machine or refrigerator needs to be connected to the internet, after all. But the smart cooking pot Aaron Christophel just took a look at may be even more over the top. It is loaded down with powerful processors, microcontrollers, a high-resolution touchscreen, memory chips, and a Wi-Fi module. How much computing power could it possibly take to switch on a heating element?

In any case, that is what Christophel found, so he decided to put the hardware to good use. If you are going to have all of that computing power in your cooking pot, then you may as well use it to play Doom while your food heats up. So Christophel disassembled the device to figure out how to make that happen.

Inside, he found the few expected components that are actually needed, like a heating element, relay, and safety shutoff switch. But aside from that, he also uncovered a fairly powerful Renesas R7S721031VZ processor with a 32-bit Arm architecture paired with 128MB of RAM and another 128MB of flash memory. As if that wasn’t serious overkill already for a cooking pot, Christophel also found an STM32 microcontroller, an ESP32 microcontroller, and a PIC microcontroller. No wonder these “smart” gadgets cost so much!

The Renesas processor was the most powerful available, and it was already driving the touchscreen, so Christophel chose to work with it and dumped its firmware using an SWD flash tool. After decompiling the binary and learning how the display worked, he developed new firmware for the chip and flashed it to the device. This firmware runs Doom, and uses the touchscreen as the controller. So if you were wondering: Yes, cooking pots can run Doom.

To see all of Christophel’s technical wizardry in action, be sure to check out the video below.