Although toasters should be among the most boring appliances in a household – with perhaps just a focus on making their toasting more deterministic rather than somewhere between ‘still frozen’ and ‘charcoal’ – somehow companies keep churning out toasters that just add very confusing ‘smart’ features. Of course, if a toaster adds a big touch screen and significant processing power, you may as well run DOOM on it, as was [Aaron Christophel]’s reflexive response.
While unboxing the Aeco Toastlab Elite toaster, [Aaron] is positively dumbfounded that they didn’t also add WiFi to the thing. Although on the bright side, that should mean no firmware updates being pushed via the internet. During the disassembly it can be seen that there’s an unpopulated pad for a WiFi chip and an antenna connection, making it clear that the PCB is a general purpose PCB that will see use in other appliances.
The SoC is marked up as a K660L with an external flash chip. Dumping the firmware is very easy, with highly accessible UART that spits out a ‘Welcome to ArtInChip Luban-Lite’ message. After some reverse-engineering the SoC turned out to be a rebranded RISC-V-based ArtInChip D133CxS, with a very usable SDK by the manufacturer. From there it was easy enough to get DOOM to run, with the bonus feature of needing to complete a level before the toaster will give the slice back.
