Aug 17, 2019 11:00:00

Remodeling the oven for playing house so that it can be powered by USB Type-C

by

Colleen McMahon

The 'Easy Bake Oven ', an oven for playing house sold in the United States, is a toy home appliance that can actually bake cookies and the like. Jason Serandro, who usually works on augmented reality (AR) hardware as an engineer, modified the Easy Bake Oven to work with a USB Type-C connection instead of an electrical outlet.

USB-C Easy Bake Oven — Reclaimer Labs
https://www.reclaimerlabs.com/blog/2017/3/14/usb-c-easy-bake-oven

This is the Easy Bake Oven that Mr. Serandro remodeled. Although it is an oven for playing house, it is an American toy that can generate the heat to bake pancakes and cookies.

Amazon | [Easy Bake] Easy Bake EasyBake Ultimate Oven, Black A8720S00 [Parallel imports] | Cooking toys | Toys

Mr. Serandro's goal is to power the Easy Bake Oven with USB Type-C instead of a general household outlet. When Mr. Serandro first disassembled this easy bake oven and investigated the structure, it was said that it had a simple structure of main power supply, switch, nichrome wire of heat generating part, and light part.

According to Serandro, the first problem with connecting an Easy Bake Oven to USB Type-C is 'voltage.' The maximum voltage that USB Type-C can output is 20V, but the main power supply of the Easy Bake Oven is 120V, which is 6 times. To solve the voltage problem, Mr. Serandro added a wire wire to the nichrome wire in the heat generating part so that one nichrome wire is parallelized in 6 divisions on the circuit.

As a result of the remodeling, the voltage of the heat generating part became 1/6 and the voltage problem was solved. The resistance of the heat generating part was about 1/36, the flowing current was 6 times, and there was no change in power consumption.

After clearing the biggest problem, Mr. Serandro connected the USB Type-C controller

FUSB 302 and Adafruit's micro controller board METRO 328 to the feeding part, glued it to the main body, and replaced the resistor with a smaller resistor. , I installed a USB Type-C connector in the place where the power adapter connection part was originally.

Mr. Serandro said that he rewrote about 4000 lines of

Google's open source repository for Chromebooks in order to implement operations such as setting the maximum allowable voltage and maximum power for newly incorporated electronic components and turning on the exterior light at startup. That. I plugged the completed USB Type-C Easy Bake Oven into the 87W power adapter for my Macbook and turned it on.

As a result, the USB Type-C version of Easy Bake Oven works normally, and the temperature rises to about 150 ° C over 15 minutes. Mr. Serandro put the dough in the oven and baked the cookies brilliantly. The baked cookies are below.

Cookies baked in the Easy Bake Oven are delicious.

'The project was completely successful,' said Serandro. In response to the question, 'Why did you decide to connect the Easy Bake Oven to USB Type-C?', 'Why?' Because I like being done. '