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Cooking With Your USB Ports

tekgoblin writes "Wow, I would never have thought to try and cook food with the power that a standard USB port provides, but someone did. A standard port provides 5V of power, give or take a little. I am not even sure what it takes to heat a small hotplate, but I am sure it is more than 5V. It looks like the guy tied together around 30 USB cables powered by his PC to power this small hotplate. But believe it or not, it seems to have cooked the meat perfectly."

7 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Volt is not a measurement of power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I hear a lightbulb works just fine too.

  2. Re:Volt is not a measurement of power by arth1 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Each powered USB hub supplies a maximum of 0.5 A. Using two or four USB cables against the same hub won't increase that.
    The voltage in USB is a constant +5V.

    So from each powered hub, you can get 0.5 A * 5 V = 2.5 W. Eight of those gives you 20 W, which should be enough to crisp bacon if you make the frying area small enough.

    But hooking up multiple USB cables to each hub serves little purpose (well, you lower the overall resistance a tiny bit, and I guess HiFi freaks would say that it makes the bacon more open and airy).

  3. Re:Volt is not a measurement of power by Russ1642 · · Score: 2, Funny

    You have to climb a flight of stairs to get to the kitchen.

  4. In the words of Dr Ian Malcom by netsavior · · Score: 4, Funny

    "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

  5. Re:Volt is not a measurement of power by sirlatrom · · Score: 2, Funny

    Because the fucking stove is for fucking?

  6. Works for telco landlines, too by e9th · · Score: 2, Funny

    For those who still have landline phones, Mike Sandman, purveyor of genuinely indispensable old-school telephony gear, has some telco line powered goodies.

    Don't even try to order any of them, though.

  7. Re:Why not use the CPU/GPU as heat source for cook by llamapater · · Score: 2, Funny

    your dorm was a mobius strip too?