DIY Amazon Alexa Smart Toaster
Ever wanted to make your toaster smarter? While the Griffin Smart Toaster still isn’t widely available on the market, there are various DIY solutions that help you turn your current toaster into an automated device. Let’s check out just how you can do so.
This year, a lot of devices on the CES 2017 floor showed up with the vision of making the smart home market a better place. One of the most notable announcements was the unveil of the Griffin Home collection of smart home appliances. Aiming to make your life a bit more connected, Griffin plans to bring a whole array of smart products, most notable of which being the Griffin toaster. A smart toaster connected to your smartphone and home automation ecosystem. Making the perfect toast every time. Who wouldn’t want that, right? The official release date of the toaster is still not known and we would love to get our hands on one.
Inspired and when searching for the best smart kitchen appliances, we were eager to find the next best thing or an even better toaster. Nevertheless, we were not able to do so. In fact, outside of the Kickstarter and Indiegogo spectrum of not-realized-yet-ideas we weren’t able to find even a mention of a toaster that connects to your smart home. That’s why we decided to build our own. Here’s just how you can make your own smart toaster right away at little to no cost.
A Smart Toaster via a Smart Plug – Easy!
Budget: $50-$75
Difficulty: Easy
One of the easiest DIY solutions for a smart toaster is going on the route of purchasing a smart plug. We often mention smart sockets as an easy and entertaining solutions for home automation that is also affordable and the reason we do so is because it is. Even though the plug is limited to simply being turned off and on again, integrated with IFTTT, controlling the flow of electricity to your appliances can give you an array of easy home automation solutions. A smart plug also provides you with a smart toaster. Here’s what you need to do.
- Buy a smart plug.
- Connect toaster to smart plug.
Going Hardcore – An Amazon Alexa Smart Toaster Solution!
Budget: $25-75
Difficulty: Advanced
Ok, we have to give credit, where credit is due. Trying to find DIY solutions used on array of appliances to get inspired to build our smart toaster, we actually come across an amazing toaster solutions by Yazdan Shirvany.
Published on Hackster.io, the tutorial Yazdan gives us is amazing. Even though you can basically achieve the same effect with a smart plug, there’s nothing like tinkering with boards, such as the Particle Zero is definitely a great experience. What’s more, every home automation enthusiasts who has made a DIY solution knows that no matter how advanced ready-to-install solutions are, it’s sometimes best to just build your own.
A Smart Toaster for the Win!
There you go! Now you can turn on your toaster right when you get up from your bed and have nice and warm toast ready for you, fresh with your morning coffee from your smart coffee maker. We know that the solutions we’ve mentioned above are extremely limited, but if you don’t want to mess around with the actual board of your toaster or go around building your toaster from scratch, there isn’t anything better than what we already have. Of course, we would love to hear your solutions. Do you have an idea how to make a smart toaster? Already build your own? Let us know in the comments below!
