Brian Gaff (Sofa) wrote

I had one without a turntable once, completely useless.
It claimed to have a rotating aerial, but this ended up having
cold and hot spots all over the place due to standing waves.

Mine does have a turntable but that failed and I have
been too lazy to fix it and it works fine anyway.

"Richard" wrote in message
...
On 09/03/2021 02:23, Paul wrote:
williamwright wrote:
Is there any way of getting a clear view of the inside of a microwave
oven when it's working?

Bill

Get the physics department at the local university involved ?

As a human, you have stereoscopic vision, and looking through
the microwave cutoff filter in the door of the microwave,
you can reconstruct a rough idea of what is on the other side.
As long as the microwave light bulb is still working.

Using more cameras (webcams), you should be able to do better
than human visual quality.

Start with some ray tracing, to get some idea where to
place the cameras (precise to millimeter offsets). The
cameras you set up on your optics bench placed next to the
microwave door, will have some relationship to the spacing
of the holes on the door. You may not get enough overlap,
with sloppy or random webcam placement.

*******

And to relate a story about this.

Some time ago, the light bulb in my Panasonic microwave burned
out. Fine so far.

Fast forward. I'd been noticing that some microwave cooking
runs now, were burning spots of stuff on the cookware. I
decided to shine a LED flashlight through the cutoff filter,
for a look.

And the damn turntable had stopped rotating. Which explains
why the food was not cooking evenly.

So yes, kids, there is value to looking inside, at
what is going on :-) It's not always magical in there,
and sometimes your luck runs out.

Maybe that microwave we had decades ago, with no turntable,
and requiring a windup microwave turntable, wasn't such
a bad idea after all. That thing never had any plastic bits
fail on it. There was always a scowl on family members faces,
having to wind up the turntable gadget (which sits on the
floor of the microwave cavity), before each usage, to get
uniform cooking. The alternative, is the poorly designed
modern motorized version. Which fails soon after the lightbulb
burns out.

Paul

The modern version is one without a turntable.