Show HN: I hacked my microwave with a Raspberry Pi

* a picture of a whole chicken

* one ice cube

* two ice cubes

* something that might have been a burger or a slice of bread

* 3 x straight lines

* 3 x wavy lines

Never being sure, I ignored all of those buttons. But even the basic 'set a time, a power and go' method was awful.

* Choose a power. There was no default. You had to do this before you'd set the time, or the time would reset back to 0.

* Turn a wheel which increases the time. The first two minutes increment 1 second. After that they increment in 10 seconds. So to get to 5 minutes, you had to spend ages turning it.

* Press 'Go'.

Next to the 'Go' button there was a 'Cook' button, which reset everything.

There was a defrost mode, which seemed to heat the contents for 2 minutes and 10 seconds (couldn't change the time). The results were identical to just heating it on full power.

But even worse, it would only work if you input the desired time and power... AND YOU HAD TO PRESS BUTTONS FOR THOSE.

Yes, neither of them were default, you had to seek for a "time" button, press it, then turn the knob, then seek the power button, press it, turn the knob, and if you did it wrong it would get into some weird states of waiting for a certain input that it was not clear what it wanted, and it was not clear how you could cancel it (it does have a cancel button, but it took me a while to realize I had to press it several times in a row to reset the thing so I could try again).

The microwave is so annoying that in the end I gave up and don't used it anymore, I only relied on food that was palatable without heating, or I used the old fashioned fire.

EDIT: I remembered another one: also had no number pad, instead it featured the following buttons (that required some good force to register a press): +5 seconds, +10 seconds, +30 seconds. Wanted to make a lasagna that take 16 minutes? Good luck.

Clearly designed by an evil bastard.

Its not as annoying as it sounds. Just decide how long you want to cook for, subtract that number from 5, hit the '5' button, and open the microwave when the countdown clock gets to the number you calculated earlier.

Surely you have the industrial machines do the pasta sauce in a factory, so no need to measure tomatoes and dice onions. Similarly the chicken breast can be cooked and pre-sliced (or cubed).

The greatest problem I foresee with this is maintaining hygiene. The machine will slop and mess, eg pouring ragu, cooking with oil that splatters. Those surfaces will need cleaning and ingredients that spoil readily (fresh diced chicken) will need disposing of and replenishing regularly. It certainly doesn't seem impossible but each section would need specialised washing equipment it seems, or maybe be entirely submersible and so allow the machine to be flushed from the top and then have a steam wand clean the individual stations.

I see it working for making dishes in an automat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat) but not really being efficient enough for a domestic situation.

Perhaps a digester for the expired foodstuffs and left overs could be built in to generate energy for heating and cooling required in the machine?

Ever tried to soften a small piece of cold butter? 10 seconds is way too long for that

That technology is called a 'Microwave Inverter'. A lot of Panasonic microwaves have it.

The user name kind of gives the game away

Then you have arbitrary code execution as ntpd. Unless you have apparmor, or some other MAC.

But if I live in an apartment building, and my belongings can be burned to the ground because the apartment above me decided to put their microwave on the internet, I wouldn't want any of my neighbors doing this. It's not a good idea for everyone, everywhere, all the time.

* EDIT: Just the "internet enabled" parts mostly (unless you're qualified/experienced enough to understand the hazards), not all the other hardware hacks (i would estimate that anybody etching their own circuit boards would have a pretty firm understanding of electrical safety).

As zanny pointed out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6030206), since we know the chipset, and can anticipate available features, given that we know the networked device is a Raspberry Pi, and that we have the source code of the project, this provides us with enough information to craft possible payloads to drop onto the system. It's certainly not a huge attack surface, but there might be _just_ enough wiggle room to bust in.

As for the QR Code concept, any chance of some plans for adding a small low-end camera?

Even if the camera is not very good (maybe a $20 USB webcam), and the picture is poor quality (perhaps a ~0.3 megapixel image), as long as the image of the QR Code can be captured, the software that attempts to discover the QR Code and pull the information out of the low-quality image will do the rest. Then, it's just up to the user to print out some QR code stickers. Actually, come to think of it, I bet there are probably some burritos out there with QR codes on the wrappers, pointing to some burrito website, that could be re-purposed to trigger the microwave.