The Stove Guy: Sam D'Amico Shows New AI Cooking Features on America's Most Powerful Stove at Impulse
TL;DR
Impulse built a battery-backed stove that hits absurd power levels — Sam D’Amico says the cooktop uses a 3 kWh LFP battery to add 15,000 watts on top of wall power, letting a burner push up to 10,000 watts and boil roughly a liter of cold water in about 40 seconds.
The core product is really software-defined hardware, not just a stove — Impulse redesigned the induction coils, driver boards, temperature sensing, firmware, and controls from scratch so the knob feels “analog” like gas while the system can hold precise closed-loop temperatures and improve via OTA updates.
Sam’s bigger play is distribution and platform leverage, not only selling premium stoves direct — alongside its own cooktop, Impulse sells “Impulse Core” to major appliance OEMs and is launching Zephyr-powered products into hundreds of U.S. showrooms, aiming to operate more like a software company than a logistics-heavy hardware brand.
The AI demo wasn’t a gimmick-only moment: Claude actually controlled the stove — on a dev unit, Sam asked Claude to set the right scallop-searing temperature, pull web recipes like Kenji López-Alt’s Korean fried chicken, create step-by-step flows, set timers, and send burner commands across multiple zones.
AI also changed how the company builds internally — Sam says Claude Code and Sonnet helped him, a self-described hardware guy, build an end-to-end fleet telemetry stack on AWS with Terraform, something he hadn’t done before, and speed up UI prototyping from Figma into working stove software.
The origin story came from pizza in Japan and a consumer-electronics mindset — after getting a pizza in 30–45 seconds at Seirinkan during a haptics conference trip, Sam realized that “you slam a battery into it” lets you decouple appliance UX from the grid, then applied lessons from Meta, Oculus, Google Glass, Tesla, and Palmer Luckey to home appliances.
The Breakdown
America’s most powerful stove, live on camera
Sam opens with the pitch in hardware terms: Impulse Cooktop is, in his view, the highest-performance stove on the market. He demos a pot taking 10,000 watts on a single burner, enough to get cold water boiling shockingly fast, while a Zephyr ventilation hood automatically spins up in response.
Why the knobs matter as much as the watts
One of the first “oh wow” moments is the magnetic knob system: pull a knob off and the burner shuts off; turn it and the response is immediate. Sam says that analog gas-stove feel was intentional, and that achieving it required redoing the power electronics, firmware, and control stack from scratch so the stove controls everything from knob motion to bubble formation.
Dogfooding, test rigs, and a 30-person team shipping hardware
Around the studio are stacks of weird pans, thermocouple-wired cookware, and QA setups born from real customer complaints like “this pan works funky.” Sam says the company is just 30 people, many cook on Impulse units at home, and they’re validating an update that triples temperature-control performance — getting to target temp in about 40 seconds versus roughly 1 minute 50 seconds on the current public release.
The stove as battery platform, and the business model behind it
Sam walks through the exploded internals: a 3 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery, custom induction driver boards, sensors, and coils all built around the idea of decoupling appliance power output from the wall. That architecture doesn’t just make a better stove; it also underpins “Impulse Core,” a modular platform already sold into multiple major appliance OEMs, with global partner launches planned this year.
From Meta controllers and pizza in Japan to home appliances
The origin story is pure founder brain: while in Japan for the IEEE haptics conference, Sam got a pizza in 30–45 seconds and started wondering what power density would make that possible in a countertop device. His answer — “you slam a battery into it” — combined with lessons from Oculus, Google Glass, Face ID-scale hardware programs, and Palmer Luckey’s low-hanging-fruit insight, pushed him toward appliances as a space where a small team could still move the frontier.
Why stoves beat VR as a startup wedge
Sam gets unusually candid here: he didn’t want to build another hardware company that required an app store, subsidized developers, or a likely acquisition outcome. A stove has direct value on day one, no ecosystem tax, and if you electrify kitchens with battery-backed appliances, you also quietly add distributed energy storage to a grid strained by EVs, heat pumps, and AI load growth.
Claude on the cooktop: scallops, pasta, and recipe agents
Then the video turns into a very fun AI demo. On Sam’s unlocked dev unit, Claude sets a scallop-searing temperature, controls timers, fetches recipes from the web, converts them into structured steps, and even sends commands to multiple burners for dishes like Korean fried chicken and char siu egg fried rice.
The pitch: useful AI in the kitchen, not a party trick
The cooking payoff is simple but effective: the scallops look great, the butter doesn’t burn, the cheese sauce stays controlled, and guests happily eat the results — “78 out of 10, dude.” Sam frames this as the real opportunity: not smart-home gimmicks, but embodied intelligence that automates hard kitchen tasks, ships through a couple hundred Zephyr showrooms nationwide, and reaches homes through OTA-improving appliances people already know how to buy.