This Microwave can be controlled using a phone and tweets when its done cooking

Developer Nathan Broadbent has hacked away at his microwave to add stuff that any self-respecting microwave manufacturer of the year 2013 should have probably added themselves. Voice commands! Barcodes that pre-set cooking times!

Meet the Raspberry Picrowave. As you might’ve gathered from the name, it’s a Microwave mashed up with a Raspberry Pi, the $25 micro-computer adored by modders, hackers, and geeks ’round the world

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Here’s what it can do so far:

  • Clock sets/updates itself across the Internet
  • A barcode scanner pulls cooking instructions from an online database. Such a database didn’t actually exist, so he’s building one himself, adding directions as he goes.
  • Voice Commands, like “Microwave, Twenty seconds, Low.” (Alas, Nathan says his kitchen’s acoustics screw this up a bit.)
  • Custom sound effects (because beeps are for chumps).
  • You can control the microwave from your phone. The only uses I can think of for this are: when you know you’ll want microwaved popcorn later and can preload a bag, or when you want to convince your friends that you’re the biggest geek on the planet because you have a microwave that you can control with your phone.
  • It tweets when it’s done cooking, because of course it does.

The project gets a whole lot more impressive once he starts getting into the deeper details, from wiring the Pi into the microwave’s power supply, to designing a new control panel, to etching and producing a custom PCB that fits in the place of the original.

Below is the video showing the Microwave functionality.

Source: Tech Crunch

1 comments
  1. We need this remote control for our RV which has its oven so high that we cannot see the control pad. And everytime we connect to shoreline we have to set the clock who knows what time zone! Where can we buy this controller ? I have had a beginner’s class on the Arduino but I don’t know about PCB etching.

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