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.”
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Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/youtuber-makes-doom-run-on-a-smart-cooking-pot-after-a-full-firmware-refresh#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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