PhoneWave

Inspiration

Smart appliances and IoT devices are an integral part of the modern household. Most everyday household gadgets have the ability to connect to wifi and be controlled by computers over the internet. So we thought to ourselves, how can we take the philosophy of modern technological convenience and integrate with our favourite outdated machinery. PhoneWave is a new dial-up controlled microwave that is sure to disrupt the phone and microwave industry simultaneously.

What it does

PhoneWave is a phone controlled microwave that allows users to call their microwave and set instructions through dialling numbers on their phone.

How we built it

We decoded the DTMF frequencies transmitted by a phone through dials and reverse engineered the input segments to bypass the regular button input and allow us to transmit DTMF signals as input into the microwave. We used an arduino with a TRRS audio receiver to transmit the phone dials and decode them using the Goertzel formula. We then resoldered the primary control board on the microwave to allow us to accept DTMF signals.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part about this project was figuring out how to interface with the microwave without having any explicit datasheets, manuals or references. In order to figure out how to use the microwave we had to take apart the control panel and analyze the board to check where the electrical signals were mapped. This was very complicated but once we figured out how the microwave inputs worked we were able to get it to work with our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our proudest accomplishment was putting our engineering knowledge into practice and being able to analyze a piece of old hardware by ourselves. Also using a lot of safety procedures to make sure that we were to execute this project as safe as possible.

What we learned

We learned a lot about reverse engineering hardware without any sort of reference and we also learned a lot about how audio signals are received and transmitted through computers as well as how the decoding process of these audio signals work.