Agile Hardware

September 02, 2015

At Key Ingredient, we’re pretty heavily invested in Agile, Scrum in particular. This year we really wanted to try to ship some hardware in an Agile fashion. So after hiring a team and discussing, we decided that Kanban was right for the hardware projects. The first hardware project we tried was our little smart pan. The idea is that we’d ship a new prototype every two weeks to dogfood.

By using off-the-shelf parts, we were able to do the first prototype in 14 days.

Our Mark I prototype(I’m a Marvel Fan), was built using Raspberry Pi B plus some other stuff from Adafruit. It just did simple temperature measurement and alerts. Mark II was just a cleaned up version of Mark I. We did a better job of hiding the wires.

Over time, we added additional features including boiling and burning detection.

Mark V even included a built-in touchscreen.

Overall, the project has been super fun and most importantly has allowed us to learn a ton about what it takes to make a connected kitchen product.