Doom now runs on a smart pressure cooker, because of course it does. A hardware hacker has turned the Krups Cook4Me into a tiny Arm-based Doom machine by tearing down the appliance, reverse-engineering its firmware, and repurposing the touchscreen controller as an embedded game system. The actual cooking hardware stays in its lane, while the front panel quietly becomes the weirdest “handheld” in your kitchen.
Popping the lid on the Cook4Me reveals a very clear split in design. The lower board is a simple, safety-focused setup with an STM microcontroller handling the heating relay, temperature sensing, and a failsafe cutoff to kill power if something goes wrong. All the interesting stuff lives in the touchscreen module, which sports an ESP32 Wi-Fi chip and a Renesas R7S721031VZ processor, an ARM core paired with 128 MB of flash and 128 MB of RAM, plus a capacitive touch controller, display driver, beeper, EEPROM, and even an unpopulated SD card slot. It is, functionally, a small embedded computer pretending to be a UI for a cooker.
The creator first poked at the ESP32’s flash, found it encrypted, and spotted cloud chatter hinting at Amazon Web Services and MQTT with private keys, so that path was a dead end for modding. Instead, they tapped into the Renesas chip via SWD, dumped the firmware, and used bootloader logs to reverse-engineer how the LCD init sequence worked. With that solved, they built and flashed custom firmware, wrote a wrapper around a Doom port, and mapped virtual buttons to regions of the touchscreen.
The result is Doom running locally on the cooker’s display at a surprisingly solid frame rate, all while the heating logic remains untouched on its own microcontroller. It is completely absurd and a must-have for every kitchen.
Source: Aaron Christophel via Tom’s Hardware
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