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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."

9 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 mayberry42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ...In any case why not just use the fucking stove.

      Because some people enjoy the challenge of creating something fun, new, original and, yes, pointless.

    3. 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.

      --
      Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
  2. WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is the ALL TIME stupidest use for a computer i have ever seen and the most useless Slashdot article as well

    1. Re:WTF? by SpeZek · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You must be new here.

  3. 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."

  4. 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!

  5. Re:Overly elaborate setup by ari_j · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Many people desperately want to do the "hard hacks" that would earn them geek cred. They want to be the guy who builds a 5,000rpm pneumatic Lego engine or who converts a Roomba into an automatic dog-walker. The problem is that most of them are stupid and uncreative, so you end up with "hacks" like cooking bacon with power from USB ports.