Is IoT Getting Out of Control with Smart Ovens?

We have “smart” everything these days, from watches to door locks, the IoT has converted mundane everyday items into connected devices.

So it seems natural that one of the most recent areas to enjoy the touch of IoT is that of the counter top oven. Sure, ovens aren’t the sexiest things ever but you would be surprised about the level of technology inside of them! One such device is the Tovala Smart Oven that recently reached their funding goal on Kickstarter. The Tovala allows you to connect it to your smartphone in order to change cooking settings. It will not only cook your food through traditional baking and broiling, but it can even steam your food. Time to leave the Hot Pockets at the store!  

What’s really tasty is the technology that lies within the Tovala. This allows it to not only connect to your phone but also recognize special food packages for automatic cooking. First things first, regardless of whether you are making a home prepared meal or one of Tovala’s pre-made meals, it automatically controls the cooking chamber. It can even bounce between various cooking modes for optimal cooking via special algorithms. Tovala can even scan meals made by them and configure the settings automatically. Wireless connectivity is brought to you by the Particle PØ Wi-Fi module and the Broadcom BCM43362 Wi-Fi chip. If you’re sick of microwaved food, you can head over to their Kickstarter and pick one up for $199.

If you can afford a more pricey smart oven, you can even remotely watch your food cook with the June Intelligent Oven. The June Intelligent Oven has a host of features that bring counter top ovens into the 21st century, the most interesting of which is the HD camera. The camera isn’t just a gimmick, though, it allows June to automatically identify what you’re cooking and switch to the appropriate settings. The feet of the device also have load cells so you can use the top of the oven to weigh your food for proper cooking times.

Dominating the façade is an edge to edge glass door with an integrated five-inch touchscreen and metal dial for adjusting settings. You also have the option of using a special app to keep tabs on what’s cooking remotely. At the heart of the June oven beats a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor with a 2.3GHz clock rate. Driving that tasty little display is an NVIDIA GPU sporting 192 CUDA cores. In-oven camera views and CUDA cores don’t come cheap, however, with the June ringing in at a hefty $1495. More information on reserving one can be found at their website.

Each oven occupies a different end of the price spectrum, but both strive to simplify our extremely busy lives through integrating the latest technology. These are probably just the beginning of an IoT oven revolution and it will be interesting to see what kind of hardware is packed into the next generation of smart ovens.