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McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines were hacked and the Cold War began

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As the trouble escalated, Nest cameras went to mount Frobot cabinets to capture video of what might be wrong inside. Once, they saw how the components of a Tesla factory Frobot were mixed out of Taylor’s machine and the liquid yogurt was catastrophically bleeding into the nearby closet. Seven hours later, a Tesla food service worker was seen accidentally opening the closet, untouched by the sticky mess and quietly replacing the plastic pallet component he had forgotten when cleaning the machine.

It soon became clear that their business was opposed to automation: no one at Levi’s Stadium or Tesla was able to form or maintain a Frobot without the constant practical support of the founders of Frobot. And the problem was the Taylor machine that was at the heart of Frobot. “Holy shit,” O’Sullivan recalled, he realized. “They just suck on these machines.”

O’Sullivan and Nelson began to make it clear that they would have to pivot. And they had already inadvertently built a prototype for another product that provided a solution to the problem of ending the current business.

For the next year, they tidied up the small computer component of Frobot that listened to Taylor ice cream machine data, building features that allowed visibility and control of all machine variables – including some that automatically avoided 5-2. -3-1 code to access its service menu – software interface for diagnosing and troubleshooting many problems with the machine, and it turns on the Raspberry Pi mini computer case.

In the spring of 2019, they re-launched the company, this time under the name Kytch. (A sign of the greatness of their intentions, they chose a name that suggested the idea of ​​an entire connected kitchen, leaving open the choice of products that went beyond Taylor’s ice cream machines).

When Kytch launched it in April of that year, he walked around the Nelson Bay Area looking for any restaurant that used a Taylor machine, presenting franchisees on LinkedIn and offering a six-month free trial before starting a $ 10-a-month subscription. After finding some initial customers for Burger Kings and Super Duper Burgers, they eventually began to enter the real target market, with not only franchisees representing the largest collection of Taylor machine owners, but also those who used the most complex ones, for the most part. digital version of borked Taylor’s product: McDonald’s.

In the fall of 2019, as McDonald’s began to delve into the baroque inner workings of the world, O’Sullivan and Nelson were surprised to learn that most restaurant owners had never entered or even heard of a service menu that unlocked temperature-like variables. glycol used in machine packaging or pasteurization. “It was a real‘ aha ’moment,” Nelson says. “Why are these features so important behind this menu that people don’t know are hidden?”

Meanwhile, many McDonald’s owners paid thousands of dollars a month to Taylor distributors in service fees, often for making easy changes blocked behind that menu. So they added a function called Kytch Assist to Kytch, which automatically detects some common machine faults as they occur and adjusts these hidden variables to prevent some mishaps before they occur.

A franchisee, who asked WIRED not to identify him for fear of paying McDonald’s, told me that his restaurant’s ice cream machine had been out almost every week as a result of a mysterious failure in the pasteurization cycle. He examined the assembly of the machine again and again, in vain.

The installation of the Kytch revealed almost immediately that an overworker was doing too much mixing in a bucket of the machine. He wakes up every morning at 5:30, picks up the phone, and confirms that all of his machines have passed the treacherous heat treatment. Another franchise technician told me that despite the fact that Kytch has nearly doubled in price over the past two years and added an $ 250 activation fee, the owner “can easily save thousands of dollars a month.”

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