computers

While walking through Walmart a few weeks ago I noticed a Black+Decker WiFi enabled slow cooker. My initial thought was what a great idea - being able to remotely start dinner or adjust the cooking parameters is really convenient. The second thing being the security issues these IoT devices present - an always-on device on your home network phoning home through an unknown service with no updates or transparency - not to mention the eventual abandonment of the services/apps supporting it.

In saying that, I’ve been meaning to buy a slow cooker for a while, and when I saw that these were reduced to $30 my curiosity got the better of me.

Of course, the first thing I did was take it apart to find out how they’ve implemented the WiFi functionality. A few minutes later, attached to the front panel between the buttons I found this:

A CEAC-IOT04M. At heart this device is a Qualcomm Atheros QCA4004. The QCA4004 appears to be quite a capable device, and includes a TCP/IP stack, RTOS and various interface options. This was interefaced to the cooker’s micro, some variety of ABOV device, via a UART.

And while I haven’t actually configured the device on to my network and don’t really intend to, the slower cooker works perfectly well “disconnected”…