Cooking Dinner at Home—From the Office

About this technology

Overview

In 1994, David Mansbery was at the helm of an active family whose schedule rarely allowed for home-cooked meals. Growing tired of frequent fast-food dinners, Mansbery set out to bring traditional, home-cooked dinners back into his home. At the time, Mansbery was president of a natural gas supply company, and Glenn Research Center was one of his biggest clients. When Mansbery pitched his idea of a hot-and-cold, remotely operated oven to Glenn, the NASA center lined him up with a group of its engineers that had worked on the ISS Electric Power System, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) that studied the Sun, the Cassini spacecraft that is currently visiting Saturn, and several experiments that flew on the Space Shuttle. These engineers supplied Mansbery with Embedded Web Technology" software that was developed at Glenn in 1996. According to its inventors Embedded Web Technology marries embedded systems (hardware or software that forms a component of a larger system and is expected to operate without human intervention) and the World Wide Web to let a user monitor and/or control a remote device with an embedded system over the Internet using a convenient interface. Embedded Web Technology allows astronauts to operate experiments from anywhere on the ISS using any laptop computer available to them. With authorization to use the Embedded Web Technology Mansbery formed the TMIO company to execute his idea. The NASA software enabled low-cost real-time remote control and monitoring of the resulting intelligent oven product ConnectIo. With combined cooling and heating capabilities TMIO's ConnectIo stainless-steel professional series oven provides convenience for today's active lifestyles. Before leaving for work consumers can place cold food in ConnectIo where it will remain properly refrigerated until a programmable cooking cycle begins; the oven is preprogrammed with a universal cooking menu which can be customized to the user's preferences. The menu allows the user to simply enter the dinner time and the oven automatically switches from refrigeration to the cooking cycle so that the meal will be ready as the family arrives home for dinner."