USB hotplate cooks dinner

Have you ever been excited about some new hardware you've bought, only to have a non-techie parent / friend / co-worker scoff dismissing your new toy? My favorite is that age-old rhetorical question, "Ah, but can it cook me dinner? Because at that price, it should..."

To one enterprising Japanese blogger, that answer is "Why yes, it can!"

He posts, following the humiliation of the failed USB Fried Egg experiment, that he needed to take a leaf out of the Tim "The Toolman" Taylor Cookbook and go for...MORE POWER. 30 times more power to be precise - six PCI USB cards with five ports per card, for a total of 30 ports.

Take a regular USB coffee warmer (now pathetically tame in comparison), wire everything up with a bunch of resistors under the hotplate and we're cooking with gas USB!

The proof is in the pudding beef, as they say (Stop it! -Ed)... and by all accounts, it works a treat. He has even posted two videos where you can actually hear the beef sizzling! Naturally, it's a rather complex solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist...but as a "hey, why not?" project, it's definitely hot property. And it could be a handy pizza warmer at your next LAN event.

You can read the original blog, or take your chances with Google Translate beta. Usually the image hosting for blogs like this fall over at the mere mention of a Digg or Slashdot so we have preserved the highlights below just in case.

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