Software-Defined Cooking Using a Microwave Oven

Despite widespread popularity, today's microwave ovens are limited in their cooking capabilities, given that they heat food blindly, resulting in a nonuniform and unpredictable heating distribution. We present software-defined cooking (SDC), a low-cost closed-loop microwave oven system that aims to heat food in a software-defined thermal trajectory. SDC achieves this through a novel high-resolution heat sensing and actuation system that uses microwave-safe components to augment existing microwaves. SDC first senses the thermal gradient by using arrays of neon lamps that are charged by the electromagnetic (EM) field a microwave produces. SDC then modifies the EM-field strength to desired levels by accurately moving food on a programmable turntable toward sensed hot and cold spots. To create a more skewed arbitrary thermal pattern, SDC further introduces two types of programmable accessories: A microwave shield and a susceptor. We design and implement one experimental test bed by modifying a commercial off-the-shelf microwave oven. Our evaluation shows that SDC can programmatically create temperature deltas at a resolution of 21 C with a spatial resolution of 3 cm without the programmable accessories, and 183 C with them. We further demonstrate how an SDC-enabled microwave can be enlisted to perform unexpected cooking tasks: Cooking meat and fat in bacon discriminatively and heating milk uniformly. Since the introduction of microwaves to the consumer market in the 1970s, they have seen widespread adoption and are today the third most popular domestic food heating method (after baking and grilling).13 Indeed, the original patents for the microwave by Raytheon Inc. in the late 1940s envisioned a universal food cooking instrument for all kinds of food ranging from meat to fish.1 While microwaves have revolutionized the kitchen since their inception, today's consumer microwaves are mainly used as blunt heating appliances (e.g., reheating pizzas) rather than precise cooking instruments (e.g., cooking steak).