Just last night, I found myself staring dumbfounded at my microwave, wondering what all of those damned buttons do. We’ve all been there. Do those straight lines represent plates? Are those wavy lines a strip of bacon, or something else entirely? What’s the difference between one ice cube and two? (And why are there ice cubes on my microwave?) Is that chicken icon for cooking chicken, or just meat in general? My microwave has more than 30 buttons, and yet once I (eventually) found the “immediately start cooking for one minute” button, it’s the only one I use. The fact is, microwaves are well known for their truly awful interfaces — and that’s why hardware hacker Nathan Broadbent has created a microwave, powered by a Raspberry Pi computer, that allows for voice control, smartphone/tablet control, and automatic cooking by scanning a product’s barcode.
Dubbed the Raspberry Picrowave, Broadbent essentially took a standard microwave, and squeezed an Arduino Nano and Raspberry Pi inside the chassis. The Arduino microcontroller manages input from a new touchpad (created by Broadbent), and the Raspberry Pi manages the microwave’s more advanced features. The Arduino is connected to the Raspberry Pi, which in turn is attached to a powered USB hub, which is connected to a USB microphone, speaker, WiFi adapter, and barcode scanner. (Read: What is the Raspberry Pi?)
The Raspberry Pi itself runs custom software, written by Broadbent, that manages all of these peripherals. The main microwave daemon listens for touchpad presses coming from the Arduino, or commands from the other peripherals via TCP, and controls the microwave accordingly. The barcode program listens to the barcode scanner, and connects to the internet to look up a product’s cooking instructions when you scan a barcode. The voice control program listens to the microphone and uses PocketSphinx to perform voice recognition for a limited set of commands (“one minute on high,” “seven minutes on defrost,” etc.). And finally there’s a Sinatra web app, that lets you control the microwave via a web browser (on your smartphone or tablet, for example).
The end result, as you can see in the video above, is a microwave that is a whole lot easier to use. Instead of reading the instructions, simply place the dish in the microwave and scan the barcode. Instead of looking for the mystical button combination that will result in a few minutes of non-ionizing radiation bombardment, just tell the microwave in simple English what you want to do. Most importantly, though, it now means that Nathan Broadbent is the first ever person to cook a raspberry pie with a raspberry pi — a claim to fame that will surely haunt him for the rest of his days.
For more details on what is one of the most elaborate software and hardware hacks that we’ve ever seen, be sure to hit up Broadbent’s site. All of the circuit board layouts and software are open-source, so you could make your own Raspberry Picrowave if you wish.