How Patents Are Stopping Your Microwave From Being Awesome

It’s a nice little example of the cool product hacking going on these days, and is yet another cool example of the Raspberry Pi in action. The folks over at Reviewed.com wrote about this last summer and pointed out that Broadbent was putting established microwave oven makers to shame by doing the kind of thing they should have been doing ages ago.

Of course, it’s down in the comments where we get a suggestion as to why we haven’t seen this kind of innovation actually appearing in the market: patents. A guy named Paul Becker notes that he had explored this idea about a decade ago, but realized there were too many patents in the area, meaning that it would be impossible to bring it to market. He notes it’s not an exhaustive list, but here are a few of the patents named:

◾US Patent 4,323,773: Bar code controlled microwave oven
◾US Patent 7,404,519: Microwave oven with bar code scanner
◾US Patent 6,124,583: Barcode reading microwave oven
◾US Patent 7,723,655: Microwave oven using bar code and method for controlling the same

Not all of those patents are still valid, but those seem to be just ones involving microwaves with barcodes.