Project ideas

Backlog of ideas worth a sidequest when time allows. One section per idea: what, why, rough shape. When an idea graduates to a real project it moves to ~/projects/ (see the ideas repo) and leaves a backlink here.

Reverse-engineering Monsieur Cuisine Connect

Own the Lidl Monsieur Cuisine Connect (smart food processor): root it, reverse the APK, and build a self-hosted recipes website/service that integrates with the homelab’s mealie (OSS)/tandoor (OSS) trial pair (currently evaluating which one stays).

The idea, in layers:

• Root the device — the MC Connect is an Android-based appliance; the attack surface is the standard one (bootloader, OTA images, ADB). Outcome: shell access, ability to sideload.
• Reverse the APK — the companion app and the on-device app: recipe sync protocol, the guided-cooking API, where the recipe store lives. apk-reverse (OSS) is the purpose-built agent skill for exactly this (dex patching, repacking/signing, packers, native layer) — the triggering capture for this whole idea.
• Own recipes on the device — either a patched client pointing at a self-hosted recipe server, or an import bridge: MC-format recipes generated from Mealie/Tandoor meal plans pushed to the device.
• Website — small self-hosted frontend (or just Mealie/Tandoor with a plugin) that becomes the single source of truth; the device syncs from it instead of Lidl’s cloud.

Why it matters: the MC ecosystem is walled (Lidl’s cloud only, no export), the hardware is paid for, and every meal already flows through the homelab’s kitchen stack. Killing the cloud dependency is the same self-hosting move as Homelabs — but for an appliance.

Open questions: how locked the bootloader is (community state of the art worth researching before starting — search “Monsieur Cuisine root” on XDA/GitHub first); whether recipe sync is signed; whether Tandoor’s API is rich enough to generate MC guided-cooking steps or only ingredient lists.

Related: apk-reverse (OSS) (the tooling) · android-apk-patching (existing Hermes skill) · mealie (OSS)/tandoor (OSS) (integration targets)