TouchPad Microwave Hack Finds Videos That End Right When The Popcorn Is Ready

Your better half is off doing things more important than making you food. Looks like it’s leftovers night! You stick the grub in the microwave, punch in the time, hit start… and you’re bored. A minute and thirty seconds?! To heat CHICKEN!? WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH ALL OF THIS TIME.

Meet the μWave, the most clever mish-mash of a hack I’ve seen in ages. Part microwave, part TouchPad, and part Arduino, the μWave automatically fishes around YouTube and plays back a video that’ll come to an end right as your food is finished.

This lovely little hodgepodge was built by a group of students for the University of Pennsylvania PennApps hackathon, where they went home with the gold (plus $2500 and a chance to pitch their project to Google NYC). It uses an Arduino to tap into the microwave’s countdown, pings a server for a well-performing video of the appropriate length, and then pushes that content to a TouchPad.

Wonderful. Check out the Demo video below (and remember: they only had 2 days to build this):

Microwaves, HP. WebOS Microwaves. Problem solved.