Last year John Kestner released the Range smart thermometer, an iOS-enabled thermometer that gave at-home chefs access to a wealth of data about how their food cooks. Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
Last year John Kestner released the Range smart thermometer, an iOS-enabled thermometer that gave at-home chefs access to a wealth of data about how their food cooks.
Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
Now he's launching the follow up gadget: the Range Oven Intelligence system. Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
Now he's launching the follow up gadget: the Range Oven Intelligence system.
Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
It comes in a case, which hangs off the side of the oven and has its own sensors for heat and vibration. Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
It comes in a case, which hangs off the side of the oven and has its own sensors for heat and vibration.
Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
The heat sensors allow it to keep a close watch over the oven’s temperatures. The vibration sensors allow the device to react to a tap or a double tap, and then send voice notifications like “bake for 12 minutes.” Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
The heat sensors allow it to keep a close watch over the oven’s temperatures. The vibration sensors allow the device to react to a tap or a double tap, and then send voice notifications like “bake for 12 minutes.”
Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
By collecting data about your stove, the Range OI can eventually start to assist in cooking tasks, like predicting the optimal bake time for certain recipes. Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
By collecting data about your stove, the Range OI can eventually start to assist in cooking tasks, like predicting the optimal bake time for certain recipes.
Photo: David Clift-Reaves, Supermechanical
When John Kestner released the Range smart thermometer a year ago, he made baking, candy-making, and home brewing—all of which require a fussy, highly scientific process—almost foolproof. The iOS-enabled thermometer smartened-up cooking by plugging into an iPhone and giving at-home chefs access to a wealth of data on what was happening inside their food, like temperature graphs and optimal bake time.
Today Kestner, co-founder of Austin-based design studio Supermechanical (and creator of Twine, the early Internet of Things gadget), is launching a Kickstarter campaign for the Range Oven Intelligence, a follow up gadget to the original Range—which monitors the oven itself.
Like the first product, you stick the Range OI thermometer into your food, and it reports temperature data back to the app. Also like the first product, the OI is programmed to know how long certain foods take (like meats, candy, baked goods) to cook, and will send alerts to the user’s phone when food is close to being done. But unlike the original, the Range OI doesn’t need to be plugged into an iPhone headphone jack; it uses Bluetooth LE to communicate to the app.
But the novel feature in Range OI is the case itself, which hangs off the side of the oven and has its own sensors for heat and vibration.
The case’s heat sensors allow it to keep a close watch over the oven’s temperatures. That data in turn allows the app to make projections about the readiness of the food inside based on data, instead of the frequently unreliable temperature readings on the oven. The vibration sensors allow the device to be programmed with actions: For example, it can sense a tap or a double tap, which then can be programmed to set the timer running on certain notifications like “bake for 12 minutes” or “tell me when preheating to 400° is done.” (On a safety note, these sensors will also let you know if you’ve left your house with the oven on.)
A More Modest Future, Now
“We’ve been waiting around for the promise of the Jetson smart home. But if you’re the average person, you don’t buy an oven. I’m 37 and I’ve never bought one—it just comes with the place,” Kestner says. “We’re approaching the smart oven like a television and a set top box. Most people get something like a Roku or Apple TV and get better connection.”
So rather than drop $12,000 on an Android-powered oven and stove, Kestner proposes tacking on one accessory that can make standard ovens intelligent. Besides the obvious difference in cost, people tend to have a sentimental attachment to their ovens. Each one varies in terms of temperature sensitivity, and cooks learn their recipes with those inevitable inaccuracies in mind. For that reason, the industrial design of the Range OI case was crafted specifically to camouflage with most standard ovens: it’s a slim, silicone, dagger-shaped accessory that can hang inconspicuously from the side of an oven.
Kestner hopes that besides untethering people from their kitchen while food is in the oven, the freedom afforded by the Range series will enhance the emotional experience of preparing a home cooked meal. Much like the Modernist Cuisine movement that partly inspired the Range line, the belief here is that by treating cooking like a science, you can produce more creative results. By collecting data about your stove, the Range OI can eventually start to assist in cooking tasks, like predicting the optimal bake time for certain recipes.
“There are a lot of little nagging worries we have in the kitchen that add up to us not cooking as often, or as well,” Kestner says, of ovens in particular. “The microwave was a great advancement in technology, but it doesn’t really lend itself to social rewards. Even if I’m at home baking cookies, I take them into the office. They’re about the emotional reward you get from it.”
The Range Oven Intelligence goes on sale today, for an early bird Kickstarter price of $99.
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