Visibility inside microwave oven

[williamwright]

Is there any way of getting a clear view of the inside of a microwave oven when it's working?

Bill

[Tim+]

Take the door off and poke a pencil or something in all the nanny state interlocks. ;-)

A new bulb helps too. ;-)

Tim

[Andy Burns]

"How to film the inside of a microwave (2 ways)"

[Paul]

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

[Richard]

The modern version is one without a turntable.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Well its a tuned cavity so I'd have thought the problem is both of leakage of the output if you are near it, and the detuning of things if the door mesh was removed. I don't know what lights are in them, one assumes they are old fashioned filament lamps or they would be fried. Same goes for an endoscope camera through a convenient holed made somewhere. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

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. Brian

[John Walliker]

The operating frequency isn't stable either. If you put something in which is off-centre, the frequency sweeps up and down the ISM band as the turntable rotates.

John

[Richard]

[#Paul]

Moving your head from side to side can help here, as your brain can remember the views through the gaps in the mesh and join them together.

#Paul

[Andrew]

My first microwave oven was a Phillips, bought in 1986. It didn't have a turntable and had just one electromechanical timer that you turned to the desired number of minutes and it buzzed back to zero. No power or other fancy settings settings.

[Martin Brown]

They should have a wave stirrer to break up any standing waves. Perhaps the bit that was supposed to move had failed in your unit.

My microwave/combi oven doesn't have a turntable and works very well.

More interestingly it has a clever log spaced wire metal shelf that it will still work quite happily with inside the oven. I suspect it can either recognise the loading and adjust power levels accordingly to compensate. I almost never run it at maximum power.

It can also do combinations of grilling or hot air with microwave too.

Oven chips by weight program mode does some very odd combination.

[Andrew]

Make /model ?. My wonderful Sharp, stopped working as a microwave at

17 years old and the brand name has been sold to a Turkish company.

[bilou]

Over the years I accumulated quite a lot of dead compact fluorescent lamps.

You discard the electronics. You put at least 20 bulbs in a clear plastic bag. You put the bag on the turn table. You get a good idea of the energy distribution inside. Some fun too :-)