Smart Home Blog

If you’d like to have a PC on your kitchen you may follow by that approach. But with iPad it can be done much easier. Sure it won’t provide functionality such barcode reading or so. But you may use it to store favourite recipes, read news or watch video.

[via Unplggd]

Combi Chef 6 microwave is probably the first microwave in the world equiped with USB port! For what reason it’s done? Well, the idea is to prepare different kinds of scenarios to cook your favourite dishes, store them to the USB stick and then just pickup desire one from the menu. Not sure that it’ll be useful for personal using but it might be helpful for the restaurants, coffee houses etc.

By the way, I don’t understand why everybody worry about possibility to charge their gadgets via microwave’s USB port??? In my mind you can find better place in your home for that 😉

I found very interesting DIY project of kitchen PC. It includes an ELO 19″ 4:3 touchscreen, Intel Core i5 processor based PC, iPhone-like user interface and a bunch of useful applications such kitchen database with barcode scanner, cooking timer, todo list etc. Additionally Twitter client, iTunes, Skype, Google Maps, weather app are available for users. Also PC allows to watch TV (DVB-T) and works as digital photo frame in standby mode.

The kitchen PC runs Windows 7 and uses Active Desktop feature to set custom UI. The budget of the kitchen PC is about €1000. Thanks to the author you can download all used applications including UI, graphics and kitchen database.

Well, the project looks pretty cool. But … It’s overpriced I think. First of all in my mind the nVidia Ion with dual-core Atom would be more appropriate choice. It’s cheaper, more compact and energy efficient but offers the same possibilities – run rich GUI or watch HD video. I’m also would like to see Linux as OS instead of Windows. Cause it’s more reliable and it takes less resources. So, you don’t need the strong processor and big amount of RAM to run applications included into the kitchen project. In any case, that project demonstrates how attractive a kitchen PC can be and it gives a basic ideas for your own project as well.

Good example of using used EEE netbook is demonstrated by German folk sidekickx81. He created a media PC for his kitchen. It allows to him watch DVB-T TV, video from online services or network shares, listen music, check receipts or weather forecast. In standby mode it can be used as digital photo frame.

The kitchen PC is controlled by touchscreen added with USB touchscreen set because original EEE doesn’t have that feature. It’s connected to LAN via WiFi. So, no additional wiring is needed. Moreover, thanks to netbook battery it can work a few hours after power cutting.

Nice idea, implementation and … music in video clip 🙂

Smarthome should definitely have smart kitchen. The ICD showed its nVidia Ion based nettop to make kitchen smarter. No any words about spec or price. But I suppose that the kitchen nettop should be equiped with touchscreen “designed to meet the demands of a busy kitchen”. The kitchen nettop can be used to store recipes and playback of media content from your media hub.