Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/21/microwave_meals_made_fun_with_tablets/
YouTube-linked microwave shows vids as it nukes
Cook time equals play time
Posted in Hardware, 21st November 2011 12:34 GMT
Watch Now : Virtual Machine Movement with Hyper-V
Students have found a way to spice up microwave meals by attaching a tablet to their radiation-oven, playing YouTube videos while the food cooks.
The µWave uses the Arduino open source prototyping platform to read the cook time, which it sends to a server over an Ethernet connection. The server searches for a YouTube clip of the same duration, which subsequently plays on a tablet mounted to the front of the cooker, eliminating that boring two-minute wait watching nuked food rotate [1], Hack a Day reports.
Classmates at the University of Pennsylvania came up with the idea for the 2011 PennApps hackathon [2].
Check out the following video clip, or visit the µWave website [3] for further details on how it was created:
Of course, not all students are wealthy enough to Sellotape fondleslabs to their kitchen appliances and leave them there, but it's a novel idea nevertheless.
Then again, there'd have to be some kind of filter on there - I can think of plenty of videos that would put me off wanting to eat altogether. ®