This Microwave Only Cooks While You Play a Video Game

There has been a movement in recent years towards "gamifying" everyday tasks in life. The goal is to take advantage of the same psychological mechanisms as video games do, such as quantifiable progress and incremental rewards, to motivate yourself. If, for example, you want to exercise more, you could track exactly how far you walk and compete with your friends — a strategy utilized by Fitbit users around the world. You can gamify just about everything in life, but Allen Pan might have taken that idea a bit too literally when he built this microwave oven that only cooks while he plays a video game.

Pan is the proprietor of the Sufficiently Advanced YouTube channel and he made a name for himself by tackling outlandish projects. He created this project for Wired (a publication that wishes it was as cool as Hackster), but it still features his signature style. The idea here is simple: the microwave only works while the user is playing a game. That can be any of the dozens of games available on the generic all-in-one handheld console that Pan attached to the microwave oven. To cook his lunch completely, Pan has to keep playing for several minutes.

Disclaimer: Don't go messing around with microwave ovens. They can be dangerous. That's especially true if you remove or modify the shielding.

This project required two major steps. First, Pan needed a way to determine if the user was playing a game on the console. Second, he needed to control the power going to the microwave. He accomplished the latter by hardwiring the microwave oven so that anytime it receives power, the microwave emitter turns on. After making that change, the microwave oven was controllable through a standard relay.

It was harder to detect whether or not the user was playing a game, because the console is closed-source and isn't easy to interface with. Fortunately, the console only outputs sound when a game is being played. Pan was able connect the speaker output to an Arduino Uno board to detect audio. If audio is playing, then the Arduino switches on the relay to turn the microwave oven on. This is a silly way to gamify cooking, but it is still entertaining to watch.