Introducing the Anova Developer API: Unlocking the Future of Connected Cooking

If you’d asked me thirty years ago what I’d be doing today, I’d probably have told you I’d be tinkering with electronics. I grew up in a home filled with computers and early-generation home automation gadgets. In the 1980s, my dad "automated" our house with X10 modules, and the idea of controlling lights remotely really fascinated me — long before “Internet of Things” was a marketing buzzword. By 2008, I was building software and server solutions for connected devices and experimenting with mobile apps that could talk to thermostats, lights, garage doors, sensors, and cameras. Many years later, that curiosity and desire to build has led me to Anova Culinary, where I run the engineering team and oversee everything from mobile apps and cloud infrastructure to the integration of firmware that powers our cookers and ovens.

When I joined Anova in 2019, one of the loudest requests from our community mirrored the internal Anova engineering team's wish: “Please give us an API!” Our connected Precision® Cooker and Precision™ Oven products are essentially small computers with sensors and motors, and the maker in me always thought it would be fun to integrate them into a custom home-automation-inspired setup. Over the past few years, our team has quietly worked to build a secure, fully supported developer platform that makes it easy to build on top of Anova’s connected products. Today I’m thrilled to announce that the Anova Developer API is available to everyone.

A new way to cook, for tinkerers and chefs alike

The Anova Developer API gives developers authenticated access to the same cloud and local services that power our mobile apps. Whether your device communicates over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, the API can be used to read the current state of your cooker or combi-oven — including temperature setpoints, cooking stage, remaining time, sensor status, and more — and to send commands such as start, stop, preheat, or adjust steam. For our third‑generation Wi-Fi connected products, we’re also exposing historical device telemetry, so data nerds (I count myself among you) can chart temperature curves across a 72‑hour brisket or monitor oven conditions during a bread proof. To help you get started, our developer portal includes documentation and example projects that show how to authenticate, read states, and send commands.

Over the years, we’ve watched resourceful cooks figure out how to tap into our devices using undocumented APIs. I love that level of curiosity — but I also understand the frustration (and challenge) of reverse engineering tools just to build a dashboard.

What can you build?

Here are some creative and practical ideas we’ve heard (and dreamed up) from the community:

• Home Assistant Dashboards – A common request is to display the cooker state alongside the rest of your smart home. With the API, you can integrate your Anova devices into Home Assistant, Node‑RED, or dashboards like Grafana. Imagine a panel that shows current water temperature, target setpoint, remaining time, and humidity (for ovens) across multiple devices, along with trends over time.
• Ice-Bath – Monitor ice-water temperature, or use calendar events or location services to cook your steak and have it ready when you arrive home. For instance, a script could check your Google Calendar, see that you’ll leave the office at 5 p.m., and send a cook command to your Anova Precision™ Cooker to start heating the ice-bath water to temperature for the perfect steak, ready to sear when you arrive home.
• Voice, IFTTT, and AI Chatbot Integrations – Connect your devices to different voice services or Slack. You could ask “Start my sous vide at 135 degrees for two hours” or receive a Slack notification when the cook finishes.
• Cook‑sharing and Social Dashboards – Many of us already post photos of our sous‑vide steaks and other baked goods on social media. With telemetry access, you could also share graphs of temperature over time or humidity curves for a sourdough bake. Think Strava or Peloton, but for cooking.
• Energy Awareness – Pair energy consumption sensors with the API to monitor the power usage of your cooker or oven over an extended period of cooking. That data might help optimize settings or schedule cooks during off‑peak hours.
• Multi‑Device Meal Orchestration – Use temperature probes and routines to coordinate multiple appliances for a single meal. For example, you could sous‑vide a steak with an Anova Precision® Cooker and monitor its internal temperature with a Bluetooth probe. When the probe hits 130°F, and some time has passed, your script sends a command via our API to the Precision™ Oven to convection bake a side dish. At the same time, the script activates a connected induction burner for a quick sear and starts a smart multi-cooker to prepare another side dish. By the time the steak finishes searing, the vegetables and rice are done, and the oven transitions to “warm” mode. The result is a coordinated, restaurant‑quality dinner with minimal fuss.

These are just starting points. We can’t wait to see the next wave of innovation.

Getting started

Head over to our new Developer Documentation. You’ll find documentation that walks you through authentication, retrieving device IDs, and interacting with both local Bluetooth APIs and cloud endpoints. We’ve included sample code in Python. You’ll also see examples of how to subscribe to real-time data feeds for Wi-Fi connected products so you can build the dashboard of your dreams.

I’ve spent 20 years researching, prototyping, and building IoT products, software, and cloud architectures. My guiding principle has been to enable useful and delightful experiences through technology. The Anova Developer API is our invitation for you to join us in that journey. If you’ve ever dreamed of automating your morning combi-oven bacon routine or building the perfect steak dashboard, the tools are finally here.

We’re excited to see what you build. Tag us in your projects, share your dashboards, and let us know how we can make the API better. The future of connected cooking is open, and it starts today.