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Wireless-Friendly Microwaves

Posted by michael on from the press-enter dept.

Makarand writes "According to this article on ABC News, scientists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have stumbled upon a simple and elegant solution to keep your kitchen microwave from becoming a noisy nuisance to your home Wi-Fi network. They found that they could focus the microwaves into a single frequency and reduce noisy microwave emissions by placing ordinary magnets in specific patterns along the magnetron . New techniques to reduce microwave interference will be needed when Wi-Fi enabled entertainment systems will allow digital audio and video to be transmitted to different rooms of a house wirelessly. Packet drops in such a sytem would degrade the video and audio experience."

3 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yay! First comment! by lseltzer · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have big problems with the radio that the CIA implanted in my brain.

  2. Even better ... by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Funny

    They found that they could focus the microwaves into a single frequency

    Why not go all the way and make the frequency and phase of the microwave oven's magnetron adjustable, add some kind of microcontroller to drive it, and a small cpu to implement the 802.11b stack. Then, from your laptop, run this script:


    WIFI_IF=eth0
    DATE=`date +%s`
    while [ ! $TIMEOUT ];do
    DATE_PREV=$DATE
    tcpdump -i $WIFI_IF -c 1
    DATE=`date +%s`
    let TDIFF=DATE-DATE_PREV
    if [ $TDIFF -gt 5 ];then
    TIMEOUT=1
    fi
    done
    echo "Coffee is hot!"

    Ah, the marvels of technology ...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  3. Re:what about the millions of legacy microwaves? by hool5400 · · Score: 5, Funny

    legacy microwaves

    Now there's a phrase you'd only hear on slashdot.

    --

    Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.