Make microwaving even easier with a synchronized-turntable solution that prevents you from ever having to reach all the way into the back of the microwave to get your reheated beverage! The true chef’s choice.

Background:

The microwave oven is an amazing boon for the diligent cook and lazy food-seeker alike.

Sure, a microwave can heat something up in almost no time, with no open flame and using very little energy, but could it be even more convenient?

The answer is yes.

The issue:

Most modern microwaves contain a turntable, which allows food to be heated more evenly (Figure 1).

Unfortunately, there is a horrendous downside to this turntable: when a user puts an object in the microwave (such as a cold coffee), they tend to place it on the “near” side of the turntable (close to themselves)—but the rotation of the turntable may cause the object to end up on the far side of the turntable at the end of the elapsed microwaving time.

Now the user will have to reach all the way into the microwave to retrieve their warmed-up beverage.

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Fig. 1: The turntable feature allows food to be more evenly heated as it is subjected to the microwave’s deadly science fiction cooking rays.

Proposal:

This is a simple software-only fix: the turntable rotation speed should be synchronized to the total cooking time so that the turntable will have moved back to the starting position when the timer finishes.

E.g. a 40-second timer could result in a turntable speed of one rotation per 20 seconds, while a 30-second timer would require one rotation every 15 seconds.

Figure 2 illustrates the benefits of this new system.

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Fig. 2: In a traditional microwave, the resulting position of the coffee mug is anyone’s guess (it could be FAR (top right) or NEAR (bottom right)). But in the new and improved “ultra convenient synchronized turntable microwave,” the mug is guaranteed to return to its starting position (unless you open the microwave before the timer goes off).

Conclusion:

This is the next differentiator for high-end microwaves. You saw it here first!

PROS: Makes cooking even more decadent.

CONS: Does not work if you open the microwave early.