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Cooking With Your USB Ports

Posted by samzenpus on from the sorry-your-dinner-crashed dept.

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."

8 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Volt is not a measurement of power by Albert+Sandberg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Watt is. The important is how much current he can get from supplied voltage. In any case why not just use the fucking stove.

    1. Re:Volt is not a measurement of power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      According to Wikipedia, 500mA per USB2.0 port.
      15A * 5V = 75W

    2. Re:Volt is not a measurement of power by marcansoft · · Score: 2, Informative

      None of those "plugs" actually say that, and none of them actually meet the USB spec. They just happen to work... most of the time.

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

      If it uses the recent battery charging spec, each port can allow 1.5A if there is little to no data traffic (and 1.8A if the data connectors at the female port is shorted with up to 200 ohm resistance).

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    4. Re:Volt is not a measurement of power by History's+Coming+To · · Score: 3, Informative

      Or even better, use a brazil nut. It was a favourite trick of ours in the Scouts - a single brazil nut contains enough oil (read calories/joules) to fry an egg and a couple of rashers of bacon.

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  2. well done OP, a superb fail by wjh31 · · Score: 5, Informative

    not only has the gizmodo article disappeared at time of post, but there is no link to the original blog post (http://xe.bz/aho/24/) which is date-stamped for 2006. This is 4 years old!

  3. 5V of power by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Volts are not a measurement of power, I am amazed at the number of people who don't understand this.

  4. I knew slashdot was slow.... by ninjackn · · Score: 2, Informative

    but I didn't expect a story from over 4 years ago. For those of you who can read japanese the original blog post is here.

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