Advances in ceramic tile inspired the company’s owners Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram when they visited Ceramica in Modena, Italy, an area famous for tile production. They saw ceramic slabs 9 feet long and only 1 centimeter thick. “We thought, why don’t we look into integrating circuitry into the tiles? Almost treating them like a big circuit board, or like a sort of substrate to add technology to it,” Weisshaar said.
The SmartSlab table is two inches thick overall but the ceramic top layer is only half a centimeter in thickness. Beneath the ceramic, which is made from Ceramica’s SapienStone, are a foam layer, an aluminum spine, and a hot-formed, fiber-reinforced bottom layer made from recycled plastic bottles.
The electrical wiring and circuitry are just below the ceramic tile. There are two inductive cooking elements, eight heating elements, and five heat-transfer cooling elements. So you can cook on one end of the table and keep hot dishes warm and cold dishes (or wine) cool at specific locations all the way down its length.
The table controls are at the cooking end. An LED touch interface lets you use your iPhone or Tinder swiping skills to turn on and adjust the SmartSlab’s various cooking, heating, and cooling elements.
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