Hacker News Reader

The Instant Pot ecosystem would benefit from open-source firmware, so it can be integrated with Home Assistant and voice controlled systems like Alexa, Siri, Google. The company is under PE management and in bankruptcy, but for the sake of the millions of repairable devices out there, will hopefully find a second wind. If not, perhaps the internal controller can be replaced with a RPi.

Teardown photos: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Instant+Pot+Smart-60+Disassembl...

Disassembly video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=l4D8sLPZ3G0 & https://youtube.com/watch?v=bPrezDskchs

Instant Pot also made a $100 cooking blender clone of the $1500 Thermomix, https://www.wired.com/review/instant-pot-ace-multi-use-cooki.... Surprisingly, there are no affordable cooking robots? Bosch Cookit is above $1000, https://foodcook.net/kitchen/thermomix-tm6-vs-bosch-cookit/

Honestly I love Home Assistant and rely on it daily.

That being said, I'm not sure I'd trust it controlling a pressure cooker.

I mean, the network instructions should really not be able to do anything the buttons on the front couldn’t, but I see your point all the same.

They have a failsafe via a pressure relief, 2 of them, so I wouldn’t worry too much.

Even as a sighted cook, I do rely on the noise a pressure cooker makes when relieving pressure at the red line. There is usually a visual pressure indicator, but on most models it is rather "binary" anyways, either the knob is out or in.

Agreed for a gas-heated pressure cooker, electric would be fine.

I wonder why there wasn't a bigger market for home cooking devices integrated with Alexa. Even things like bluetooth temperature sensors would be highly useful, and you could conceivably use Alexa to monitor these devices and let you know if they go outside of your desired thresholds.

Temp-based automation is not (yet?) possible with Alexa Routines, besides Amazon making an exception for the inaccurate temperature sensors in some Echo devices, https://old.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/xbz5f6/how_to_a...

Home Assistant supports some meat thermometers, e.g. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/meater/ & https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/govee_ble/

Even Amazon killed their much-loved (30K reviews!) Alexa Microwave, https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Microwave-Small-Works-Al...

Anova $200 sous-vide cooker has Alexa integration, https://anovaculinary.com/blogs/blog/anova-voice-integration

  run  
  status
  temp raise or lower 
  timer elapsed, remaining or change
  stop

My most wanted Instant Pot modification is to replace the beeps it makes when it reaches pressure. It should play a chiptune version of Queen’s “Under Pressure”

Edit: mine might only beep when the timer expires, but that’s still a great opportunity to play that tune

In Germany there's plenty of Thermomix clones from groceries chains like Aldi and Lidl. Usually in the 300€ range. I own a Thermomix with the all cookbooks subscription but it's basically a glorified blender and soup maker for me these days (at least there will be plenty of pumpkin soups the next couple of month) as I usually cook with my normal equipment. I use my good old AirFryer more for example.

I always wanted to add some "smart cooking" device as a BA thesis topic for our students, because it just annoys me how closed these systems are (I briefly looked into reversing the TM). I mean how much cooler would it be if I could send any recipe to a smart cooking device and it would provide the easy stepthrough system of the TM instead of just their curated ones. Honestly I have never considered how cooking must feel for the blind so that's a very interesting use case.

> anything with an app is about 15,000 times more useable than the touch surfaces for most modern appliances.

As a person with pretty good sight (140% with glasses), I have to say that these sort of devices tend to be difficult to use even for me. For example, my father has an inductive stove with a touch interface, and I commonly fail to properly use it on the "subsequent first tries".

When I see a touch screen interface that is completely static (same "buttons" at the same positions), I often wonder what led to the decision to utilize them instead of just using hardware buttons/knobs. Is it a cost-saving measure, or just some managerial person who decided they needed to use something more modern?

Cost saving. They can reuse the same part with a different firmwares on different models.

It is also replacing a multitude of parts with what is essentially a single part from the perspective of manufacturing and inventory.

Since we are talking about kitchen, sensor buttons on anything are easier while cleaning from fats than all kinds of moving buttons/switches.

I’d be fine with them except that the stove completely turns off when the sensors get a drop of water on them. And your fingers has to be dry and clean to use them. Both conditions make them hopeless in a kitchen.

I find sensors are dangerous, for two reasons. Sensors react not only to your finger but also to the wet cloth while cleaning, so cleaning can change settings or switch on the heat. There is usually a "cloth-detection", but that often doesn't work. And on the hob, if you spill something, liquid might get on the buttons and change the settings. I've had a spill turning into a disaster of burned milk and even more spillage that way.

Idk how it works but when I clean my induction burner, when the buttons are wet, there is some sort of annoying alarm beep but it never ever activated some button for no reason. Also, you need to long press the power button then the burner specific button.

Of course it’s induction so even if it was erroneously powered on, it would only be an issue with a pan on it which never happen anyway when you clean.

I hate sensors buttons with passion for everything but in the specific case of an induction burner, I think that’s a smart choice (accessibility aside).

My previous ikea induction burner even had 4 virtual sliders for the temperature, one for each burner and it was so nice that I wonder why it’s not the default.

Biggest reason by far is saving cost, but there are also some important benefits for the end-user like having no moving parts and being easier to clean.

While I do get mildly irritated any time a water spillage triggers the buttons, I mostly love the sensor buttons on my induction hob. I clean the hob far more often now I can just give it a quick wipe down with a cloth and not have to try and get all the crevices on the controls.

> inductive stove with a touch interface

The UI for these seems to be universally awful. I was looking for a stovetop/hob for my mother and I couldn't find a single brand that didn't have glaring usability faults. I finally found a model that I could order sight-unseen that had knobs - but it took far too much research.

There's some law of capitalism that says that anything in the kitchen with electronics must have a devily awful UI. It isn't just microwave ovens! I have found no brand that puts UI as a priority.

Side note, I couldn't help notice that both your comment and the article at one point spell the word "meat" with a double E (as in meeting) - we can tell it's a speech-to-text mishap given the context here, but it makes me wonder how often this happens, and how much of an issue this is when the tool is used on a daily basis.

It's not a voice recognition issue as presumably both pronounciations are identical - so it's up to the software to infer the right word from context cues or grammar rules.

I've noticed quite a leap in the quality of dictation/STT over the past 10 years or so, and I really hope this and other features can continue to improve at this pace.

As someone with a colour vision deficiency I sometimes struggle with things like "this meat is in date but smells a bit iffy." I can't even begin to imagine how much more of a struggle being blind would be in the kitchen. I remember as a child we had someone visit us in school, I remember we talked about how they made a cup of tea, which seemed difficult enough, I never stopped to consider how they would make a Bolognese!

> I've noticed that sight is what I like to call a greedy sense, in that if you have this high bandwidth data input it sort of blocks you from being able to pay attention to input from your other senses.

I'm visually impaired/low vision with some neurological visual issues but I pass as sighted and this is really it. Vision takes so much work - I'm definitely going to describe it as a 'greedy' sense + steal your bandwidth analogy.

The neural cost of vision is relevant to those who wear vision-correcting glasses, e.g. what's the neural impact of choosing to have non 20/20 vision in some daily situations? Or altering the duty cycle of the eye?

https://www.imagethink.net/true-or-false-vision-rules-the-br...

> when our eyes are open, our vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity of the brain – a full 2 billion of the 3 billion firings per second – which was the finding of neuroanatomist R.S. Fixot in a paper published in 1957 .. half of all neural tissue deals with vision in some way.

> According to John Medina in his book Brain Rules, in the fight for more neural real estate that’s going on between our olfactory cortex and the visual cortex, vision is winning. He writes: “about 60 percent of our smell-related genes have been permanently damaged in this neural arbitrage, and they are marching toward obsolescence at a rate fourfold faster than any other species sampled.”

Forgive me if this is an insensitive question and feel free not to answer, but do you care about the way your food looks when it's done? I mean to say that many restaurants put a lot of time into how the dish looks, the way they put things on the plate. Do you completely disregard it or do you put the ingredients in a particular way that is convenient to eat?

Secondhand observations on plate layout, not aesthetics:

  - red plate can increase contrast with food
  - non-slip mat to reduce plate movement
  - food bumper or edge to push food onto utensil
  - food type by compartments and/or clock face location

Tableware design for low-vision users, https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/24/see-eat-through-tableware-...

> most of the products available for visually impaired people are functional but not aesthetic .. I was quite shocked at how some solutions can become stigmatising objects, like a beeping electrode that is attached to a glass that gives off an alarm signal when it is full," .. "I wanted each functional feature to become part of the aesthetics in this tableware set. So that it is really integrated and the collection can appeal to people without vision problems..

> "With five per cent vision, pouring a glass of water is like pouring something invisible into something invisible," .. "Visually impaired people can, however, perceive colour contrasts," she explained. It was an exciting puzzle for me to try to use colours and the refraction of light into water to give a visual signal when there is enough water in the glass."

Food service plating in healthcare settings, https://gfs.com/en-us/ideas/perfect-plating-creates-a-positi...

> The color of the plate makes a difference, especially for people in memory care or with vision and depth-perception issues. “A red plate can help foods—especially light-colored foods like poultry, pork, potatoes and corn—stand out,” .. plates with rims or raised edges.. help diners scoop up food.

That's really insightful, thank you! I didn't even consider that pouring a glass of water would be a challenge or that the common solution is an electrode.

Something like this liquid level sensor, https://theblindkitchen.com/product/liquid-alert/

Thanks, I like this take on sight. Sometimes I close my eyes and all my other senses seem to come alive

As realtime OCRing from a phone is getting better, I wonder how hard it would be to have a glass mounted camera paired with the phone to read aloud any text that is pointed at by the user's finger.

No fancy object recognition or trying to be smart, just fast and solid reading aloud.

This is an accessibility feature in iOS 17! "Point and Speak" in Magnifier. Only on LIDAR iPhones.

https://www.slashgear.com/1409409/apple-point-speak-feature-...

Might possibly be easier or more fun to dump the app when it’s loaded into RAM then repackage it and run it on your phone.

If you can't see well, what is the most effective way to ensure the pan gets super sparkly clean afterwards?

I'm not blind, but the way I wash dishes, when I rinse I press my fingers against the surface and slide with a bit of force through as much surface as I can. If my fingers don't skip across, it's not clean enough. It ideally should make that audible squeaky-clean sound.

I also identify minuscule stuck pieces of food through touch rather than sight. I need to not feel those for it to be clean.

Same. My fingers tell me when the dishes are clean, not my eyes.

Yes, this is the only way to clean by hand. Your fingers feel things that your eyes could never see.

A water break test[1] is even more sensitive, but requires vision. Total overkill for cooking though, even your skin oil left by touching the pot will cause it to fail the test.

[1] https://www.astm.org/f0022-21.html

Hehe, that reminds me of one of the Applied Science videos where he's trying to get a coating to adhere to glass by various extreme cleaning techniques. Afterwards he says something like "washing the dishes is basically just scraping off the big lumps of food."

IIRC his "How to choose a cleaning solution"[1] video does cover the water break test.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiL6uPNlqRw

I'm visually impaired but not blind and I have to use touch to wash dishes. The idea of only using vision is disgusting.

I'd never considered the problem of "food bit accumulation" for visually impaired people, until reading this.

The first approach of limiting escape makes sense (e.g. vertical side, deep pans), as the problem turns a typical quick spot clean into a deep whole clean.

Related to this, using white ceramic pans comes with an interesting chalenge: they look dirty but with no impact on the food.

The white surface gets brown spots that are crazy hard to remove, but that also means it won't get to the food you prepare. So you have to make peace with having no good visual indication of how sufficiently clean the pan is.

I kinda came to assume the dark pans have the same issue, it's just not visible.

Why, you can't enjoy the sparkle and it makes them vastly less useful the next time you want to Cook.

I guess that explains why Leonhard Euler got better at math after he went blind.

Remember pantelligent? That was the saddest casualty of the patent troll kitchen wars so far.