Design of Consumer Electronic Products One of the consumer products that I developed (along with Bob Sherwood and Carlos Natividad) was a recipe crockpot for Holmes Products. The crockpot was sold under the Rival name. In 2006, we obtained a patent on this product. The schematic diagrams shown in the patent are quite accurate. We used a PIC processor from Microchip as the processing platform. The software program is embedded in the microcontroller, while the menu display, and all of the recipes are stored in a database within the external OTP, EPROM, or flash memory. I wrote the original software (firmware if you'd prefer) in PIC assembly language. The menu operates in accordance with a doubly-linked-list to form a menu tree structure. The recipes are at the leaf nodes of the tree. The display that we used was a graphical one. This enabled us to display the logo on power-on, and also meant that we could define the font's as we (actually Holmes) chose. The microcontroller communicates with the display via an I2C Bus serial interface: This recipe crockpot is just one example of the many microcontroller based projects I have designed.