Smart Microwave

Oops! Internal circuitry exposed!
Door closed
Door opened

Inspiration

While chatting online, my partner and I often discuss random crazy fun ideas -- one of which was a smart microwave. We decided that, should we ever find ourselves at the same hackathon, we would build this microwave and show it to the world.

What it does

As a base functionality, our microwave plays a YouTube video the same length as the time entered by the user on the microwave. This way, the user not only knows when their food is done heating, but they can be entertained for the duration of the heating. No more awkward pacing around the kitchen while waiting for your pizza!

How I built it

We used an Arduino UNO microcontroller to intercept the keypad data. As the user enters a time and presses "Start", we fetch a YouTube video of the entered length from our backend API and play it for the user!

Challenges I ran into

As neither of us are electrical engineering students, we had to work extra hard to figure out the electrical components inside the microwave. And, since this is a microwave, there are no datasheets are documentation -- we had to become really good at testing and reverse engineering how it worked!

What I learned

We also developed using Google Cloud for the first time, and wrote fancy Arduino code to mimic how the microwave gets keypad inputs.

What's next for Smart Microwave

We had a list of additional features we wanted if we had extra time. Here are a few ideas:

Barcode scanning, so your microwave knows what you're cooking and how to cook it
Remote control, to get your pizza just right as you come home
Tweeting, who doesn't wanna know that you just microwaved a bowl of perogies?
Mobile, take your video with you to the
Stopping only when the mug handle faces you, nobody likes reaching in the microwave for their mug!