The Most Advanced Microwave You’ll Ever Own

July 12, 2013 by Mike Szczys 50 Comments

raspberry-pi-microwave

Voice activation, one-touch cooking, web controls, cooking settings based on UPC… have you ever seen a microwave with all of these features? We sure haven’t. We thought it was nice that ours have a reheat button with three different settings. But holy crap, what if you could actually program your microwave to the exact settings of your choice? You can, if you let a Raspberry Pi do the cooking.

This hack run deep and results in a final product with a high WAF. Nathan started by taking apart his old microwave. He took pictures of the flexible sheets that make up the control button matrix in order to reverse engineer their design. This led him to etch his own circuit board to hook the inputs up to a Raspberry Pi board and take command of all the appliance’s other hardware. Because it also drives the seven segment display you’ll never see the wrong time on this appliance again. It’s set based on NTP.

We mentioned you can tweak settings for a specific food. The best way of doing this is shown in the demo video. The web interface is used to program the settings. Recalling them is as simple as using the barcode reader to scan the UPC. Amazing.

Now you can keep that old microwave working, rather than just scraping it for parts.

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3D Scanner Made In A Day

February 14, 2013 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

diy-3d-scanner

The LVL1 Hackerspace held a hackathon back in June and this is one of the projects that was created in that 24-hour period. It’s a 3D scanner made from leftover parts. The image gives you an idea of the math used in the image processing. It shows the angular relations between the laser diode, the subject being scanned, and the webcam doing the scanning.

The webcam is of rather low quality and one way to quickly improve the output would be to replace it with a better one. But because the rules said they had to use only materials from the parts bin it worked out just fine. The other issue that came into play was the there were no LCD monitors available for use in the project. Because of that they decided to make the device controllable over the network. On the right you can see a power supply taped to the top of a car computer. It connects to the laser (pulled out of a barcode scanner which produces a line of red light) and the turntable. A Python script does all of the image processing, assembling each slice of the scan into both an animated GIF and an OBJ file.

[Thanks Nathan]