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Networked Refrigerated Microwave
shades6666 writes "BBC news is reporting that Tonight's Menu Intelligent Ovens has developed a refrigerated microwave that can be controlled over the net or by mobile phone. The prototype uses a Peltier cooling device.
It expects the appliances to be ready by the end of the year, costing around $2,000."
is Internet-enabled ingredients that know how to prepare themselves and then hop into the microwave!
One of my friends and I often discuss the idea of the networked house, where everything can be remotely controlled. He always brought up one problem when I said "Hey wouldn't a networked stove/microwave/etc be a really cool idea??" : He pointed out that you actually need to physically put the food into the device - something that requires either a lot of expensive machinery or ... you. And a lot of foresight. Most people who are lazy enough to use something like this lack foresight. I know I do.
Great
/. patch
Mon - Windoze patch
Tue - Linux kernel patch
Wed - sendmail/samba patch
Thu - IIS/Outlook patch
Fri - Microwave/Fridge patch
Sat - Nerd wish I had a date instead of being on
Sun - Car ECU patch
When I walk to the pantry from my home office to get munchies for the day, I can take last night's pizza out of the refrigerator and put it in the microwave. This will save me the trip later. At lunchtime, I won't even have to wait the two minutes until the pizza is hot. I can turn the microwave oven on from my office, nearly fifty feet away!
Wow. Technology is grand. I'll hit that 350-lb mark yet!
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
I only hope that it can talk to my Bluetooth-enabled heated ice cube tray.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I may have more culinary talents than most, but if I know that I'm going to be too busy to make dinner, I'll toss a slab of beef and some potatos in the crock pot in the morning, and eat whenever I want to at night.
And it sure as heck tastes better than anything that comes out of the microwave.
Moving on...
Does anyone here think internet appliances are going to take off? The only good ideas I can see are:
A webcam in the fridge, so I could check if I needed to hit the store, and
Thermostat, so if I'm going to be gone all night I'm not heating/cooling the house needlessly.
And I bet defrosting the fridge would go like *that*...
For $2,000, the front window better be an active overlay that renders a thermal scan of the contents of the microwave, so I can see exactly how hot the AOL CD that it's nuking is getting.
"Excuse me, what's that racked next to the Cisco 7000?" "Oh, that? That's our new stackable 24-port 10/100 switch and microwave combo unit."
-- Dossy
(I wonder how many RC5 keys this new microwave can break.)
Dossy's Blog
Now I can have my exploded gerbils chilled promptly afterwards.
Sweet!
A Peltier junction that could effectively cool the space of an average microwave oven costs around $60 on the high side. Throw in adequate heatsinking and fans to the tune of another $20-30. An expensive microwave costs about $130. Embedded webserver and the associated hardware, maybe $300.
Does this device seem like an utter ripoff to anyone else? I understand "niche market" but come on... A top-of-the-line laptop costs LESS than two grand...
What percentage of Slashdot users do you think will try to install Linux on it?
Well, first off, you're saving what, 6 minutes at the most? That's how long it takes to cook most microwave dishes, except the ones which require quite a bit of manual assistance, which this gizmo couldn't prepare automatically anyway. You're also limited to the dish you chose when you left the house; no flexibility for last-minute changes of appetite. (Haven't you ever gone to the freezer for one nukable food, and decided to cook something else instead?)
For the pirce and complexity of this gizmo, I think I'd rather just nuke it when I'm ready for it.
Since microwaves don't take all that long to cook anyway, I don't see a huge need for it to start without me.
... it could just figure that out by itself and set itself accordingly.
But if you're going to the trouble of networking your microwave, how about having it do something useful.
Put a barcode reader on it so that when I pull out the box of frozen Mac and Cheese, I can scan it and have it lookup the correct cook cycle for an oven of that wattage.
Or for these things that require XX minutes on low then XX on high
A small LCD display could even display instructions at certain points in the cycle (beeping to get my attention) "Remove cover and stir, then press the START button to continue cooking."
Learn to cook for real, people. It's cheaper, sometimes healthy and definately more satisfying. Cooking is a lot like coding -- you follow instructions. Good cooking is a lot like hacking -- you follow the instructions and then do what feels right.
Lemme get you started:
Cajun Honey Shrimp and Sausage Linguine
2 servings
1/2 package linguine
2 serrano peppers, sliced
3 cloves garlic, sliced
3 T honey
3 T balsamic vinegar
3 tomatoes, chopped
1/4 c. fresh chopped basil or 2 T dried
1 link hot Italian sausage, casing removed and rolled into marble-sized balls
cream cheese
olive oil
12 21-25 ct. uncooked shrimp, peeled and deveined
1/4 c. sliced green onions
Boil water for pasta in a large pot. Heat saucepan to medium with a small amount of olive oil. Toss in the sausage balls, sauteing until they're browned (3 minutes or so). Add garlic, cook 1 minute. Add chopped tomatoes to pan and stir it up. Add the pasta to the pasta pot and begin cooking according to package directions (usually 11-12 minutes). Add peppers and basil to pan, stir together. Stir honey and balsamic vinegar into sauce. Add up to 1/4 c water from the boiling pasta pot (this will be dependant on how much water was in the tomatoes; you'll get a good feel for this after a few times making this dish). Continue to stir sauce periodically. When pasta is done, drain and return to pot with 2 or 3 T of olive oil - just enough to make it a little shiny. Mix in two spoonfulls of the sauce and mix well.
Add shrimp and green onions to sauce, cook 1-2 minutes, stirring a few times and flipping shimp in the sauce -- DO NOT OVERCOOK THE SHRIMP!
To serve, put pasta on a plate and top with sauce. Spoon 4 or 5 1/4 t. balls of cream cheese on top. Serve with wine; I highly recommend a Gewürztraminer.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Anything thats costs this much and poses a potential nuke threat to my beer is just not on.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Marge, can you set the stove to cold?
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
The Polara Refrigerated Range is the same, but is a convection oven rather than a microwave. It's got a real compressor, and is available in stores now!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I'd be more worried about some unethical varlet cracking into my meal preparation system and turning my Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam into a small, black, krinkled thing that looks like a strip of bacon just returned from the core of the sun.
"Well, what've you got?"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'll vouch for this. We have an instrument in our lab for autosampling which has (had) a peltier cooling system. The samples were required to be cooled between 2-8C. No matter how much fiddling we did with it, we couldn't get it cold enough. We managed to get it down to 6, but that wasn't cold enough to keep the samples below 8.
We returned it and went with a unit that had an actual refrigeration unit built in and have been happy.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
Fifty years ago, consumers were promised automation gadgets that would give us more free time. What do we have now? Remote controlled ovens to cook our food because we're too busy to cook it ourselves.
What have we come to?
I leave the house before the sun comes up every day. I wade through an hour's worth of traffic. I spend ten hours a day at my job, but only about twenty minutes at lunch, then wade through an hour's worth of traffic on the way home. It's dark when I get there. Weekends exist only to catch up on things I couldn't get done during the week.
I'm certain I'm not the only one out there that lives like this. Gadgets like this freezer/oven seem neat, but to me it suddenly throws into sharp contrast just what we're doing with our lives. Have we gotten so busy that we no longer have time to cook a meal? That's pretty fucking pitiful, if you ask me.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Doesn't this sound an awful lot like having a brake pedal that's also the gas pedal in a car? (but with an ethernet port!)
I can just see it now...
"This here is a brake pedal, that also runs the gas! Want to speed up? Push that pedal! Want to slow down? Push that same pedal! Want to speed up or slow down REMOTELY, when you aren't even in the car?!? Just load VNC, and click on the 'PEDAL' button on your screen!"
OOOOH! aaaaahhhhhh!
Some ideas are just too stupid to take seriously. Anybody remember the bar code reader that was supposed to revolutionize reading magazines?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Time saved using device 5 min /meal
Premium payed for device $1500
Probable lifetime of device 5 years
Times per week using device 2
Cost per heated meal = $1500/(5*52*2) ~= $3
Money per unit time saved $3/5 min = $60 / hour
Conclusion: device useful only for people with high hourly incomes, short on time, and frequent eaters of microwave food. Probably a small customer segment.
Tor
I would think a real oven with the refrigeration and remote control would be more useful here... I mean who really cooks a meal that takes longer than 10 minutes in a microwave? However, it would be great to throw a meal in the oven for the day and have it start cooking an hour before you get home...
I'm of course glazing over the fact that any sort of appliance (especially one that can burn your house down) should not be accessible from the internet.
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Rather a unit that could be preloaded with a roast or a lasagna or whatever and then remotely triggered via webphone or such would be much more useful, improve on my parent's 50 year old CookMaster with dual timers. I'd love to prep a main course the night before, or even a series of 'em over the weekend, put them into the combo unit in the am and start it all cooking 45 minutes or whatever before I expect to be home. Or if smoething comes up I just change my plans and not trigger the cook cycle, come home at midnight after a night out on the town to my meal still ready to be cooked the next day.
However as microwave ovens are usually used as quickie-cookers I don't see a 'net enabled one of them being a big hit; most of the long cooking action happens in a heat oven. Same with most other appliances there's not much advantage to remote operation. Blender, mixer, chopper, cooktop, toaster - I wanna be there for those to be on. The 'fridge & freezer? Well it'd be nice to get an alert if they suddenly start getting warm but beyond that who cares?
Inventory control? I could see some advantage to my pantry, 'fridge & freezer keeping track of what I have, hold old it is ("Time to replace the Paprika - it's just red dust now... The chicken needs to be used within 3 days, the milk is low, the lettuce on it's way out.") but really that's a local affair, no need to make it "Internet" just networkable. Indeed rather then entering all the information locally (never had any ambition to be a market clerk) I'd just as soon prefer my grocer email me a nicely formatted file every time I shop, dismiss with the long papertape version. That my kitchen app could use to make a good guess of what is going on in the larder and make suggestions, certainly a better investment then laser-scanners on every shelf and RF tags in the dairy goods.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Um, what brand of microwave are you using, and do you accept dinner guests?
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
On the very first instance of network enabled appliances I have had exposure to, the humble VCR, the first thing it does is want to phone home to get permission to do anything.
I can only imagine having monthly bills arriving in my mailbox for every appliance I have.. washing machine, dryer, refrigerator, etc. And any attempt I make of divorcing them from the net would be considered criminal.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Here is a buttload of information on solid-state cooling and other odd functions of peltier devices.
This is a great press release reprint. I wasn't aware that the BBC was counting that as journalism now too. Some choice quotes: "Embedded web technology developed by NASA" (and countless bored college students)... "Doesn't contain a computer" (as long as you define computer as an x86 based PC with a VGA monitor). Give me a break. When MIT students internet enabled their soda machines in the early '90s it was an original idea. Now it's been done before, and they're applying it to a fairly non-useful device (you can really only cook one thing in a microwave at a time).
Besides, people have been leaving their stuff in the oven on time-bake for ages, why do we suddenly need to refridgerate it for the whole day before the heat kicks in now? Can't we just have an internet enabled time-bake feature, and skip this silly refridgeration.
I mean, its cooled, its internet enabled, makes snacks. If it runs quake, it's my new lan-party machine.
And this long long speach comes to one point... That-- OOOO! QUARTER!
While I think this device is ridiculouly overpriced for what it does... nuked food generally isn't too tasy anyway, they're on the right track. I considered converting a coffeepot into an oatmeal cooker cause I like oatmeal, and I was running out of time to make it right in the morning (hate that instant craap!!) Fortunately I figured out the problem was just that I needed to get up earlier, so I started going to bed 15 min earlier. But I digress. A better idea would be a crockpot that refrigerated the food. I often used my crockpot when I knew I'd be home late (like on a night when I had a 3-hour class after work and wouldn't be home before 9:30). If I could put meat, veggies, spices, etc in it the night before and keep them refrigerated until the morning at which point it would begin slow cooking, then we're on to something. This a couple of Peltier devices could handle. It should be pretty easy to convert a regular crock pot to do this. I'll have to see if I can get some cast off Peltier coolers from work to try it. :-)
Might even be a reason to build a website with instructions
If you have all of your frozen meals in those little plastic cylinders that they use at the bank, you could pick your poison, WHOOSH, it gets tubed to the microwave, cooks it, and then when it's done WHOOOSH! have it delivered to the little port that comes out by your computer! If done properly it could even the clean and reload the little cylinder that it delivers your food in!
All you will have to do then is mount all of this up in your fully networked bathroom and you will never have to move again.
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
I spoke at length with this guy at CES this year, and his products are quite cool (no pun intended). Not only do they make a microwave, but also an oven with the same functionality (i.e. refrigeration and networked control. Pretty amazing stuff. Keeps your food cool until cooking starts, and you can tell remotely when the oven has been opened (as the CEO of the company told me, that's so he can tell that his aged mother is actually eating the food w/o having to physically check in with her). I want one of each.