Doom on a Smart Pressure Cooker: The Ultimate IoT Hack

The line between home appliances and gaming consoles continues to blur. The latest frontier of ” extreme porting” features the Krups Cook4Me Connect , a smart pressure cooker that’s been transformed into a rudimentary gaming rig for running Doom .

The feat is the work of a YouTuber who, through meticulous reverse engineering, reprogrammed the device’s firmware to run the id Software title directly on the built-in display.

Hardware Analysis: An Unexpected Technological Heart

It all started with a simple Wi-Fi connectivity analysis. Noticing that the first bytes of the MAC address belonged to Espressif , the project’s author hypothesized the presence of an ESP32 module, thus pushing him to disassemble the unit to explore its potential.

The internal architecture of the Cook4Me was found to be divided into two distinct sections:

• Safety and cooking management: A lower board, based on an STM microcontroller, which exclusively controls the temperature sensors, the electrical resistance and the safety lock systems.
• User interface and connectivity: The front touchscreen module is decidedly more sophisticated. It houses a Renesas R7S721031VZ processor (a rather high-performance ARM core), supported by 128 MB of RAM and 128 MB of Flash memory .

The hacking process

Despite the ESP32’s built-in memory encryption and references to secure cloud protocols like AWS and MQTT, the YouTuber managed to bypass the restrictions via the SWD (Serial Wire Debug) interface. By connecting directly to the Renesas processor pins, he was able to download the original firmware and analyze the bootloader logs.

This allowed us to understand how the LCD screen was initialized, paving the way for the creation of custom firmware. Once the necessary software “wrappers” were written to adapt the Doom code to the pan’s hardware, the game loaded successfully.

Results and performances

The result is astonishing: Doom runs locally on the PC with a smooth frame rate . For controls, the author mapped different zones of the capacitive touchscreen, making the title playable without the use of external controllers.

This experiment not only represents a curious technical challenge, but also highlights the structure of modern IoT appliances. The separation between critical functions (cooking) and multimedia (the interface) ensures that, even in the event of system software manipulation, hardware security protocols remain intact. Doom has conquered space, pregnancy tests, and now, officially, the kitchen.

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