Doom conquers the kitchen through an electric cooking pot — classic shooter runs seamlessly after a full device firmware refresh

A YouTuber has managed to run Doom on a Krups Cook4Mec smart pressure cooker after dumping and reflashing the firmware on the appliance’s touchscreen control hardware. Documented in a teardown and reverse-engineering video, the YouTuber shows the game running locally on the cooker’s display without modifying the electronics responsible for heating or safety systems.

The starting point was the built-in Wi-Fi of the Cook4Me. While browsing the settings menu, the creator noticed that “the first three bytes are from Espressif… so there’s most likely an ESP inside.” That observation prompted a full teardown of the appliance.

Opening the unit reveals split hardware. At the bottom of the device is what the creator describes as “really just a temperature sensor, a heating element with a safety switch.” This lower board is built around an STM microcontroller and handles the heating relay, temperature measurement, and a fail-safe cutoff “in case something or the relay got stuck.”

Connected to it by a simple four-wire cable is the front touchscreen module. Removing that assembly exposes significantly more capable hardware. The Wi-Fi module is confirmed to be an ESP32, while the main processor on the display board is identified as a Renesas R7S721031VZ. The creator calls it “quite a nice chip,” adding that “it is quite powerful and it has a lot of GPIOs. It’s an Arm core.”

The touchscreen board also includes 128MB of flash, 128MB of RAM, a capacitive touch controller, a display driver, a beeper, an external EEPROM, and “a non-populated SD card slot.” The ESP32’s flash was dumped and found to be encrypted. Logging suggested cloud connectivity, with the creator noting that it hints “it being connected via AWS cloud so MQTT via a private key,” if he wanted to do anything with it.”

Access to the main Renesas processor came via SWD. After hooking up an SWD flasher to the correct pins, the creator successfully dumped the flash. Bootloader logs made it possible to reverse-engineer how the LCD was initialized, enabling custom firmware to be built and flashed onto the chip.

With a working firmware environment in place, Doom was ported to the touchscreen system. “After writing enough wrapper around Doom and porting it to the firmware, we can fully make it run on the cooking pot,” the creator explains. The game runs on the Cook4Me’s display, with the touchscreen mapped to different regions for buttons, delivering what he describes as “a quite nice frame rate.”

Absurd, yes, but the video gives us an interesting view into how smart appliances are built. The Cook4Me’s cooking logic remains isolated on a simple controller, while its interface and networking are handled by a far more capable embedded computer. In this case, that separation made it possible to run Doom on a pressure cooker, and no doubt the Internet will bring us even more outlandish examples of weird devices to play Doom on in the near future.

There again, we’ve already had Doom in space, so perhaps that’s as weird as things are going to get.

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