Cooking Toast Using Microwave Plasma

how's it going so you know what i've been into lately ghosts oh yeah hold on let me get this hello yeah you know mate is this crankdown speaking ah yeah is this the nigerian prince don't worry man i sent the money it should be there soon no it's finley that that doesn't matter this is about the toast toast the toast i bet i can cook faster than you it's on so yeah toast i've been challenged to see who can cook toast the fastest by finley shellard he's kind of just started on youtube but i think that he makes really good videos go check them out i think it's here maybe here but anyway toast so i'm planning to accomplish this toast cooking feat using this dusty old microwave that's been sitting in the rain on the side of the house for the last five months so i guess first things first we gotta see if this thing works at all i'm weirdly scared well it seems to be microwaving oh gross good thing i just have a microwave collection on the side of the house for some reason oh yeah it works [Music] it's mildly cleaner so my initial plan was to take a microwave and jam like three magnetrons on it and have some sort of uh high voltage heated searing mechanism but i've recently become interested in making plasmoid in the microwave which i know is like 2008 youtube stuff but still cool now let me show you what i'm talking about [Music] there it is wow we got a couple seconds of one now the reason i want to use that to cook my toast is it's a great amount of power in a small space and it's freaking cool man so we got gotta find a way to reliably ignite this plasmoid and see if we can find a way to control it so first things first clearly the most important part we need to get good shots so i'm taking one out of nile red's playbook here just gonna drill a hole in the back and mount a cell phone and with the wavelength of the microwave generated by this machine being about 12 millimeters any hole under six millimeters should not let microwaves escape so hopefully i don't ruin this new phone i bought perfect so i filmed all these clips in my free time over a couple of days so the cohesiveness really fell to bits so here's voice over me professional right i first tried to make a semi-permanent igniter using an eighth inch sheet of aluminum cut into a circle with a graphite electrode sticking up in the middle the disc was cut at six centimeters with the assumption that that will match the wavelength of the microwave once it's passing through the aluminum because that's when all the funky stuff happens this was not the most successful the next thing i tried was a piezoelectric crystal i just shoved some wires in through the back and made an arc in the chamber using the igniter from a barbecue lighter hey that rhymes this worked until it didn't i finally landed on this quote-unquote final igniter design which is a 12 centimeter disc to match the wavelength of the microwaves in open atmosphere much thinner than before with a carbon electrode sticking out of the middle roll the results [Music] oh yeah [Music] still not very stable [Music] i mean that was promising our jars seen better days the electrode doesn't seem too damaged i think i want to try it with a thicker one though just in case more meat more better you know well got another jar in there [Music] look at that i'm not going too long i've already broken enough of those jars my girlfriend is very upset with me for that that seems stable though so my next escapade was to try and control the plasma to keep it from melting and breaking my jaws i broke so many so my first try i took an air hose and attached it at an angle to the jar to try and make a circular air flow through the jar this just made it very difficult to make a stable plasma weight in there no matter how low i turn the air the next thing i tried were magnets which definitely had some interesting results but again made the plasma much less stable and didn't seem very viable to control it so i threw that plan right out the window it seems that controlling the plasma is going to be much more difficult than i had imagined it might have been so if we can't control the plasma why don't we just control the toast so i've hot glued a couple pieces of acrylic to kind of form the bottom half of our jar and then we'll use our pre-toast for the top half of the jar eh [Music] i think we can use this looks like toast to me delicious now to guide our little plasma beam i've got a piece of acrylic tubing now acrylic probably isn't the best material because it'll melt but i want to be able to see through it and can't do this in glass tubing so it'll do this will go on just like that using our favorite hot glue let's see what this looks like in there here we go [Music] oh yeah i think that'll work so our little plasma stack seems like it's working all right now we need a way to manipulate the toast initially i thought i'd pull the magnetron out of this thing and you know rebuild the chamber purpose built for this but i'm not too keen on cooking my eyeballs so i kind of want to keep everything within the you know the chamber that the engineers built so i've got an idea so here's what i'm thinking we're gonna have an axis that goes back and forth that holds a stepper we'll have another axis that tilts this one and then the stepper on top will be able to spin the thing and this will all just poke a wire through the hole and hopefully we'll be able to manipulate the toast inside on the end of that wire with these three axes so first things first we need a hinge so we got ourselves a cute little hinge now now we need a piece to mount the linear rail onto so [Music] went ahead and got this guy put together that will be welded to one side of the hinge like so the other side of the hinge just gets a little mounting plate beautiful now we got our little pivot point so in order to mount our linear rail where was i yeah i've i've drilled and tapped these holes is what i was gonna say um yeah i'm just gonna use nuts got our linear rail attached that tap that i broke that was obviously intentional so i could mount a pillow block bearing right this guy goes on here just like that now in order to pull this thing back and forth i made this little piece to go on the lead screw and to attach this in the correct position i'm going to be doing a bit of a sketchy maneuver here i don't even have any anti-spatter spray cross your fingers well that seemed reasonably okay so we got this thing moving pretty good now to drive it it looks like i need to have this lined up with the bottom of the linear rail so i made this little piece which will weld on there just like that if i could stand it up screw it all up the front alrighty so we've got our back and forth motor mounts and all we got our spinny spinny now we just need our turny turny i'm thinking [Applause] i'm just gonna do this with a timing belt so i've got a piece of flat bar we're gonna go stepper mount here idler pulley over here then we can just put our other side of the hinge on here we just need a new plan for mounting it to the microwave but you know we'll figure that out later perfect now i just gotta add these little timing belt grabbers onto our piece so just like that we've got all three of our axes we just need one more part to make this thing work [Music] here we've got our working end this guy goes on to the end of a stepper which will be mounted right here and it can be twisted it can be turned and it can be moved in and out so i'm going to install the steppers on here then let's mount this to the microwave this guy is going to install on the back of the microwave just using pop rivets if they'll actually work beautiful so we got this guy installed now we just slide our little rod in there attach it to the hinge now you may be thinking that's going to sag way too much don't you worry i planned for this don't laugh at me too much i've gone ahead and installed the motor and the belt on the back so now that we'll be able to pull this back and forth now last thing we gotta do need a little toast holster beautiful and just like that we've got a fully manipulatable piece of toast through a small hole ah i think i need to adjust that a little bit i'm gonna wire this machine up and i'll be back tada looks like a normal unsuspecting microwave huh wow if you take a peek in the back we've got our whole set up everything is controlled by an arduino uno with a cnc shield i didn't install gerbil on here i'm just using it to steal the stepper drives and it's literally just running a sequence of movements to get full coverage on the toast so ain't nothing to do but to give it a whack so as you can see we've got our electrode in there then we take our pre toast and stick it on the little toast fork then we home the machine by lining it up with our precision sharpie marks here goes nothing man [Music] and we're back as you can see things have changed in here i think the toast was absorbing too many of the microwave so i came in and made a little bit of a wave guide here and then rather than the acrylic tube i've made a little guard out of aluminum sheet in hopes that it'll reflect the waves a little better oops and as you can see it seems to work all right i've also added an extra fork onto the toast holster if you will just because once it would flip over it flop down and start hitting stuff so it's a little more difficult to load the bread but the rest of this is just so hyper efficient you won't even notice got our bread loaded let's get this bread toasted [Music] [Music] tom what was that i i didn't keep track oh it's it's toasty in there now look at that if that ain't toast i don't know what toast is well not floppy semi-charred definitely cooked all the way through eh tastes like that's toast man i gotta stop eating those there's definitely remnants of the electrode coating that thing but you know the price we pay for efficiency right well won't be needing this anymore so we got our toast now full disclosure it's a couple days later and this thing's so stale i picked it up and it broke to pieces but lightly charred definitely cooked all the way through because it was in a freaking microwave so we got a two-stage cooking process now clocking in at 40 seconds isn't really great per se but you got to give me some cool points for plasma right everybody loves plasma make sure you go check out finley's video i've been intentionally kept in the dark on what he's been doing but i've seen bits and pieces and he went all out show check it out it's one of these places but yeah that's what i got for you this time if you like what you saw leave a good old hanger think about subscribing and thank you for watching there's a spiderweb on my camera [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Cranktown City

Views: 9,403

Keywords: microwave plasma, plasmoid, toast, cook toast, arduino, robot

Id: 2EpUKwD_Wp4

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2022