About the project

Everyone’s kitchens can be busy places and we like to leave notes for people, to have a calendar shared with others, to show photo’s, postcards, drawings and memories made together. We like to check news and weather on the way out in the mornings and use the internet for recipes, videos and just entertainment in the evenings. This fridge offers a new way to do all of these by taking a device we’ve all got already plugged in 24-7 and opened 15-20 times a day to bring all these features to your kitchen.

Product key features

The CM1 connected through your home wifi allows you to browse the web using your phone as a remote control. You could search for recipes, check your favourite sites or just browse while the stirring the food. The high resolution portrait format is very handy for browsing pages where most of the content is accessed by a vertical scrolling such as recipe sites.

The CM1 plays video from local sources or network accessible sources on the portrait screen. The orientation and location of the video is matched to the portrait screen and you can set the position of landscape playing to be top or bottom of the portrait screen. The high brightness LCD screen in 1920x1080 gives bright images at a wide viewing angle. Linked via bluetooth to a speaker system you can have the level of sound you want to accompany the videos.

Linked with your Bluetooth speakers of choice, you can access local or networked audio files and web accessed audio streams such as podcasts and radio. Control the volume, the track playing and the source of the music from your phone. See track and artist or station information on the fridge screen.

The calendar function holds a family calendar which can be linked with personal calendars. You can add events with different color coding, set reminders and expiry dates for events. You can set the view to emphasise the week coming up, today and tomorrow or the whole month. Those with the app in your household can view and edit the reminders.

Fridges are great places to leave notes as everyone goes to the fridge time and time again during the day. The CM1 notes function links with the calendar and when you add a note through your phone, you can set this to appear on the home-screen, to appear for a fixed time or even to appear at a fixed time. You can pick your color, font and size and use this on all your notes. You can set the CM1 to have notes appear when playing some media such as audio streaming but not get in the way of full screen video.

Don’t limit your kitchen gallery to the surface area of your fridge. Show hundreds photos and short videos from your phone, your cloud storage or local storage on the CM1 door. Select your favourite images for a slideshow or just leave it rolling through your forgotten moments from holidays, trips and events.

When you’ve told it where you are and what you’re interested in, the CM1 can provide you with streams of information from news and weather sources to get the info you want on screen. You can set a news or weather stream to add to your home screen so you have the information ready to read when you see the fridge.

Although the fridge is powered continuously, the CM1 screen can be set to power down at certain times of the day, after a certain period with no activity or following a press on the frame in a certain place. You can also wake it up using these controls, so it’s ready with your default screen when you head into the kitchen in the morning. You can also set the CM1 to select a specific screen, or a specific application after a defined time.

Behind everything, the CM1 is a fridge. Glass shelves, door shelves and a vegetable crisper all come in a quiet, energy efficient A+ rated device.

How do I use it?

The CM1 is intended to be easy and intuitive to use. There should be no need to spend hours configuring the device and you should be up and running very quickly. Once the wifi is configured and the phone app is paired to your CM1 you can control the features as follows.

Refrigeration settings are all on the inside of the fridge and operate as set when the power is on.

Wake and Sleep modes can be controlled with a touch of the screen frame or by the phone .

Selecting applications and functions in applications can be done with the phone app using the navigation and select buttons.

Entering web-addresses, usernames or search terms can be done through the phone keyboard.

Content to view, play or listen to can be provided with USB memory stick or through access to local network drives.

Compatibility:

iPhone, iPod and iPad running iOS 10 and beyond

Android devices running OS 6.0 and beyond

Technical Specification

Rewards and packages

Hinge Choices are either left hinge (Right Opening) or right hinge (Left Opening)

Shipping

Free shipping in the US, UK and EU. Shipping to Canada and Mexico is an additional £20. Shipping to Australia and New Zealand is an additional £100. For shipping outside of these areas please contact us for more information.

Stretch Goal

If we are lucky enough, and you are wonderful enough, to back this project to £750k or more in pledges we will provide a free Chill Media Bluetooth speaker with every CM1 that we ship!

Product journey

How did we come to this? We know everyone uses one every day, it’s always powered on and it is boring. So boring we cover them up with door-panels, stickers, magnets, notes and pictures. We have been trying to make fridges more exciting since 2012.

We’ve tinkered with different fun things to do with fridges for a while, both inside and outside the kitchen. This took us to the customizable guitar amp fridge and other variations which although very cool, were not appealing or clever enough.

What came before the CM1

We loved the idea of letting you decide what your fridge looked like and we then came up with the idea of changing the look of your fridge with a massive screen. Taking up almost all of the door, you can change how you look at your fridge every-day.

We made one and then we got to see just how cool it was. There are so many things we do in a kitchen and the fridge typically plays a role in only one or two of them, keeping stuff cold and displaying notes. We thought now we’ve got a screen on a fridge, let’s use it to make life in the kitchen simpler.

Our CM1 Prototype

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We spent time and effort to get the fridge door screen to play video, photo-slideshows, browse, stream videos and music and play audio files.

Timeline

This is where the prototype is now. What we need now is your support to turn this one smart fridge in to hundreds and finalize the features and functions of the CM1, so everyone can use them straight out of the box. The backers of this project will get to be included in the major project milestones and see from our updates how the project evolves. With your support and backing we can get this from a one-off which is cool to have in our offices to hundreds of people in hundreds of homes where we can find out how this works to change how people use the fridge and the kitchen.

-Production costs

We have one very expensive CM1 prototype and to make hundreds more to build a community of CM1 users will need large orders and large amounts of money. This is where the pledge money will go, buying, fitting, testing and shipping the rather large, rather cool items.

-Development costs

The prototype works well but the hardware needs refreshing to ensure we're up to date and the software needs polishing to be ready for all sorts of challenges in the varied environments it will be in, so the backers can have a really good experience using the CM1.

The team

Nick Bortone - Managing Director

An experienced entrepreneur and engineer, Nick first conceived of the CM1 and has put loads of effort in to finding out what people wanted, how you might want to use the fridge and building a team which can make it a reality.

Alex Roskoss - Technical Manager

Joining the team with a background in technology product development Alex brings hardware, software and refrigeration knowledge to the project. He's keen to drive the project to deliver the CM1 and see how people live with it.

Jonathon Stelling - Product Developer

With a keen eye for design and details, Jonathon has brought perspective and his own passion for technology to the project. Working to control the development and build a foundation for the move to production his efforts have been relentless.

Social media

www.chill-media.com

Press Kit

If you’re a member of the press looking for info or media assets, please download our press kit here, or contact us at press@chill-media.com.