Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks

196

Part II: Advanced Hacks, Tools, and Techniques

Project Overview

This project requires you to open up the toaster and modify the heating

coils. Next you will create a “mask” pattern that will cause a pattern to be

toasted onto the target bread. Finally, you will build a small microcontroller

board that will accept commands via a PC serial port and select a toasting

mask pattern.

Before You Start

When I started this hack I had a number of goals in mind:

• I must be able to use a standard toaster

• I should not have to completely gut and rebuild the toaster to make this

hack work

• I should be able to toast a variety of patterns onto the bread

• I should be able to create a toaster interface that is simple and easy to

modify

I started by opening up an extra toaster I had lying around to see what was

inside. I found a lot of breadcrumbs, layers of thin sheetmetal, and mica

sheets wound with nichrome wire.

I also spent some time at a local appliance store to see what new toaster

technologies were available. I found two types of toasting elements:

nichrome wires and quartz heating elements with reflectors (see the sidebar

Toaster Technologies).

After this examination, I thought about the various ways of “printing” to a

piece of bread. I came up with the following ideas:

• Two-dimensional heating element matrix

• Linear heating element

• Heat shield ...