The fun never stops during ARM Kickstarter week and our latest interview is with Humberto Evans, the creator of Pantelligent. This is a great story of determination and an interesting business "pivot". I met Humberto a few years ago when he launched a very cool in-browser electronics design tool called CircuitLab which continues, but Humberto is a maker at heart so he wanted to build something cool (or hot in this case) and so Pantelligent was born.
As the name implies, Pantelligent is a smart pan that very accurately senses temperature and communicates to your Smartphone via Bluetooth. Humberto loves to cook, and like many home chefs, he struggled with temperature control which is everything if you are trying to produce perfect salmon, scallops and chicken. The promise of a robot that cooked your food perfectly every time has been around since the first episode of the Jetson's, but has never come to fruition, but what if there was at least a smart pan?
So Humberto and his crew attached some sensors to a pan and tried to measure what was going on, this turned out to be much harder than it first appears - the sensor has to be in just the right place to measure the temperature on surface of the pan not the bottom and how do you communicate that information? The Pantelligent team figured out exactly how to get a sensor on a pan (without solder, duh!) by bringing in a mechanical engineer from their alma mater, MIT, and it works so well they have patented the design. Looking at many Kickstarter projects, it's rare to see a patent on a device, so this is a new twist which will be interesting to follow over time as these companies mature.
Once they had the measurement problem solved it was onto the electronics and Humberto told me that using an ARM-based device was a no-brainer, "you get a computer on a chip and it's the same price as other devices, why wouldn't you use one?" He knew that Bluetooth was needed and a quick search for "Bluetooth SoC" brought up the Nordic nRF51822 (that dev kit was just reviewed here on the community Out of Box Analysis: Nordic nRF51822-mKIT ***PRIZE POST***). Below you can see their first prototypes and the final board, and yes it was designed in CircuitLab.
The board is very low-power (beauty of the ARM Cortex-M0 processor and BLE), so it will run for 9 months on 2 "AAA" batteries which slide into the handle along with the board. Below is an advanced prototype almost ready for production:
A key design constraint in this case is the user interface and to Humberto it clearly had to be your phone. With a well written app, the user has audio, video, search and the ability to share their experiences. Again, another example of the smartphone spawning innovation in other areas. Here is a shot of the App and how informative it is:
There are several videos on the Pantelligent site, but this one below really shows the process and why it is so elegant:
Funnily enough, the day before I saw this video, I attempted to cook scallops for my family and guess what? I overcooked them, and at $20 per pound. that's food abuse!
Pantelligent is a very novel, but incredibly useful application of ARM-based technology in the pan and in your hand, you can read the full story here.
What are you going to cook?
**Pantelligent is one of 50 Kickstarter Innovations Based on ARM hosted on the recently launched 'ARM-based Projects' curated page on Kickstarter.
New and already fully funded...
Chin, you'll also be interested in this new ARM-based Kickstarter too KDJ-ONE : Portable Audio Workstation by CyberStep, Inc. — Kickstarter
I can't wait for this product to come out! I've always wanted to cook perfect scallops.