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zokier 21 hours ago [-]
My microwave timer increases in 5, 10, 30, 60, ... second steps when turning the knob, so basically very similar scheme to this. Works pretty well imho.
With rotary encoders you can also do velocity sensing which could allow convenient coarse/fine adjustment, but for kitchen timer that probably isn't that useful.
jamie_ca 13 hours ago [-]
We got one of those when our old one died, never again.
The rotation needed to bump up the next timing point is too large, if we want anything more than like 2 minutes (let alone 10) it's just so much slower than punching in time on a number pad.
austinthetaco 14 hours ago [-]
I used to have a microwave that controlled time with a rotary encoder. It did just that. Was pretty great because you could just give it a strong spin to get it up to like 20 minutes.
jstanley 14 hours ago [-]
It is customary to make the microcontroller sample the rotary encoder too slowly, so that if you turn it too fast it doesn't notice you moved it.
myrmidon 12 hours ago [-]
This is often not a sample rate issue but actually on the encoder:
Cheap physical switches can bounce enough to lose transitions on faster rotation. Can't really salvage that in software sadly.
ssl-3 14 hours ago [-]
> With rotary encoders you can also do velocity sensing which could allow convenient coarse/fine adjustment, but for kitchen timer that probably isn't that useful.
I had an old Frigidaire-made range a few years ago with a timer. It was a fairly basic thing; the only fanciful feature it had was a clock with a timer, a knob, and a VFD. No buttons at all; the mode was set by the direction of the initial turn. (The rest of the machine also worked with knobs: Simmerstats for the burners, and mode-select and thermostat knobs for the oven, with no computerization for those bits at all.)
It worked great. The rotary encoder was the most responsive I've ever used and did not appear to miss any steps. The velocity ramps were fantastic, and the knob was small in diameter and thereby easy to turn fast.
I could set a timer approximately with a quick, singular flick of my fingers, which was plenty good enough for most of my cooking. Setting a timer for about 20 or 30 minutes (or an hour, or whatever) was simple.
If I wanted to be precise, that was also simple: Get to the right neighborhood with a clockwise flick, and then just turn the dial a bit slower to work in tighter precision (down to 1 minute per encoder stop).
It takes a lot of words to describe, but it was intuitive AF in use.
The clock didn't drift much over time (it was synchronized to line frequency -- not perfect anymore, but pretty good).
Walltime was easy to set (for DST buggery or power outage), too: Same knob, still no buttons. Same excellent acceleration ramps. Just start with an anticlockwise flick, and it's setting the clock instead of the timer.
(Screw it up by twisting it the wrong way on initial rotation? It didn't matter much because the cost of resetting the clock was very, very low and the action of it felt like a pleasant release from modern human interface chicanery)
---
Clock on present-day oven also works, but it's crap. Pick a mode with a button. Set digits by holding or tapping up or down buttons. Accept input digits by pressing another button.
But tapping always only goes in 1-minute steps, which sounds nice except: The debounce is bad and it misses rapid taps. And holding it sounds nice, except: It always overshoots, by a lot -- the acceleration ramps are, to put it as kindly as I can, sadistic.
Setting the clock is miserable. The fastest and least-annoying way to adjust for DST is to mash the button 60 times at the right cadence: Too fast, and it misses inputs.
Too slow and it takes long enough that the motivation is to try the sadistic button-hold acceleration again (which will be uniformly punished by sending it even further away from the target than where it started).
I'd put black tape over the display (like a VCR from the 1980s) and forget about it, but: In a curse of integration-at-every-expense, this display is also used to set the temperature for the oven and I need that function.
krackers 23 hours ago [-]
What about removing the "0" label (which is implicit anyways) and having a label at 10sec instead. That would preserve the pattern that the last label is self-documenting as the increment interval.
TomJansen 20 hours ago [-]
Kinda clever, not sure I understand why you want 25% of the dial dedicated to 0-60 seconds. In cooking nothing is really that precise to justify that
schiffern 19 hours ago [-]
Indeed. For a dial microwave (the pinnacle of UX design IMO) 5-10 seconds is perfect for warming food, but as a kitchen 'egg timer' I unfortunately can't see much utility to small increments.
Isamu 17 hours ago [-]
Hang on, literal egg timing (boiled eggs) requires exact minutes and varies according to how you want your yolk, which in my case also depends on what I am using it for.
amelius 13 hours ago [-]
But the precision is in the 0-60 second range only ...
exmadscientist 18 hours ago [-]
If you're not set on analog and want a countertop timer, just get one of these: https://www.thermoworks.com/products/extra-big-loud-timer (though probably on sale soon given the season). It's one of those products that just does exactly what it says on the tin: it's extra big (very easy to operate!) and extra loud (they do mean that one).
Though if you prefer a portable one you can stuff in your pocket they have that too, and it also does just what it says on the tin.
clickety_clack 14 hours ago [-]
I like it, and maybe I’m log-brained after dealing with them for years, but I think the tick marks should compress as you go around the dial. The way it looks now, the distance from 4 to 5 is the same as 5 to 10, and it takes a second to figure out what’s going on with the tick marks.
shellfishgene 16 hours ago [-]
I like it, but like the kitchen timer I built a while back with a rotary encoder knob, it doesn't run on batteries forever like most cheap timers. Maybe with AI help I could get that done though. (At least for a digital one, not sure how much power that physical dial uses.)
amelius 15 hours ago [-]
I like this, but I want a timer with at least 3 timers in it, memory options. I have a digital one from AliExpress, which is quite OK, except the alarm sound is too faint and the memory button UX is awkward.
22 hours ago [-]
sinuhe69 16 hours ago [-]
Add a voice recognition to set the timer would be nice!
dvh 11 hours ago [-]
Real men make their own kitchen timers. Here's mine: indoor ambient solar power powered no-modes kitchen timer: https://imgur.com/a/ME1tx2c
pseudohadamard 20 hours ago [-]
This is, on the one hand, a very cool design, but on the other a sad indictment of more-buttons-is-better design in Western appliances. Go to Japan and most microwaves have two dials, one for power, one for time. 99.9% of the time you can get what you want with a twist of the time dial and be halfway through cooking/heating your food while the person with the keypad microwave is still trying to figure out which of the pre-Sumerian glyphs in dark grey on black keys against a black background is the one they need to press.
ninalanyon 12 hours ago [-]
My Moulinex microwave is well over forty years old and has just this arrangement plus a small dial for 0 to 90 seconds used when you just want to warm up something small.
schiffern 19 hours ago [-]
TIL I'm Japanese apparently
chadgpt5 23 hours ago [-]
Why is the wakeup feature needed?
emil-lp 22 hours ago [-]
Why not the standard 1,2,5,10?
myrmidon 18 hours ago [-]
Probably because he wanted equidistant tick marks, and this way, each label is also the unit for the major ticks in the section that follow it.
lifestyleguru 16 hours ago [-]
It's a smart solution from someone who apparently doesn't do much cooking in the kitchen themselves:)
nkko 20 hours ago [-]
love the clicks and sounds in the demo
mschuster91 16 hours ago [-]
Microwaves... I personally find something else more annoying, the power output is often regulated by a very crude PWM - so basically if your magnetron is rated for 1 kW, "500W" is effectively 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, or 15 seconds on, 15 seconds off, 15 seconds on and 15 seconds off. Or whatever ratio the microwave controller uses under the hood.
That's fine if you need something to be in the microwave for a few minutes, but it absolutely sucks if you need something to be close to (or much less than) the period time... it's completely random and depending where the prior usage started, how much active time your ingredients experience.
mhb 16 hours ago [-]
Panasonic Inverter microwaves output continuously at the power level you specify.
ssl-3 14 hours ago [-]
For a number of years, I had a Panasonic inverter microwave. I found that it worked very well at its job of warming up food, like turning a frozen burrito from a cold brick into consistent-hot goopy shame, with no blowouts, and without having to do things like pause and flip it over.
It was programmable, too. 45 seconds on high, then 2 minutes at 50%? 45P5200S (where P is the Power button and S is Start).
I also found that nobody but me cared about any of that at all. Everyone else who ever used it always ran it at 100% power.
---
One of these days, I'll get another one that has variable power like this again. But it'll be a "flat bed" Toshiba, since the present lineup from Panasonic all includes spinning glass carousels and those have always been both stupid and unnecessary.
myrmidon 12 hours ago [-]
> But it'll be a "flat bed" Toshiba, since the present lineup from Panasonic all includes spinning glass carousels and those have always been both stupid and unnecessary.
Is it? Or does Toshiba just mitigate the problem on the magnetron side?
My impression was always that the spinning is a crude compensation for non-homogenous power density (preventing hot/cold spots), which makes sense to me (except if you're just heating soup or somesuch obviously).
ssl-3 6 hours ago [-]
It is unnecessary. Carousels became mostly-ubiquitous during my lifetime; I have experienced both worlds. :)
In all cases, the magnetron emits a field that is somewhat akin to a modern flashlight in that it is directed (or a particularly fancy flashlight of yore), and it can be focused with some modicum of precision (or not). The emitted RF also bounces around inside the box like light does, and it therefore features standing wave interference patterns. So something has to move, or we get hot spots and cold spots (or perhaps even cold sides).
Carousels smooth things out by spinning the plate (and ultimately the food) around. It's easy to visualize: Just look through the door of any carousel oven in operation. (Shine a flashlight in there for extra effect.)
But (what are now called) flat bed microwaves achieve the same desirable distribution, and they do this with a rotating microwave stirrer. This spinnamathing also distributes the magnetron's RF output across the food being heated. This can be accomplished by deliberately bouncing the RF around in repeated patterns, or just disturbing the environment enough to mix up standing wave patterns, or both.
They're often shaped like metal fan blades. Sometimes, they're more-alien RF designs with deliberate ridges and/or holes. They're hidden in the top or bottom of the oven[1].
Microwave stirrers work very well. The mechanism is just invisible to the buyer while the carousel is very much visible.
And to be clear: The carousel also works. It just became the clear winner in the marketplace not because it was technologically advanced but because of buyer perception; it was easy to see, and therefore easy to sell. Microwave stirrers were (and are) much more hand-wavey.
But having scorched more than one bag of popcorn when it somehow got wedged and stopped spinning while I wasn't looking, I'd rather avoid spinning the food around. So that's how I endeavor.
[1]: The Kenmore we had when I was a kid had a mechanical timer (with a mechanical bell!) and an electromechanical speed knob (which I've come to understand was just a simmerstat like for an electric range), and the stirrer was at the top. It was metal, and fan shaped. It was hidden behind a plastic panel that was secured with little plastic pushpins fasteners. And that panel was somewhat translucent, so young-me could see that something was moving behind there.
I was little, curious, and unsupervised, so of course I took it apart. At first I was amazed that this microwave oven had metal inside of it and it had not yet caused a nuclear explosion and a black hole that wiped the entire galaxy out of existence. I figured the rest out over time.
globular-toast 19 hours ago [-]
Like the author, I've also found there are no great kitchen timers. I've had some ovens in the past that do an OK job, but my current one is terrible. I've been using a clockwork one for the past few years, but it does have the noted shortcoming of only ringing once.
The quasi-logarithmic idea is a good one. I would buy a simple one that just has a dial. No button required. But I agree with the other commenter that the 0-60 part would be quite useless for a kitchen timer. Better to have more resolution in the commonly used 0-30 minute range.
ac29 14 hours ago [-]
My current favorite kitchen timer is a Japanese one I got online. Its got 5 buttons: start/stop, reset, and add 1/3/5 mins (so for example a 12 min timer would be 5,5,1,1,start)
With rotary encoders you can also do velocity sensing which could allow convenient coarse/fine adjustment, but for kitchen timer that probably isn't that useful.
The rotation needed to bump up the next timing point is too large, if we want anything more than like 2 minutes (let alone 10) it's just so much slower than punching in time on a number pad.
I had an old Frigidaire-made range a few years ago with a timer. It was a fairly basic thing; the only fanciful feature it had was a clock with a timer, a knob, and a VFD. No buttons at all; the mode was set by the direction of the initial turn. (The rest of the machine also worked with knobs: Simmerstats for the burners, and mode-select and thermostat knobs for the oven, with no computerization for those bits at all.)
It worked great. The rotary encoder was the most responsive I've ever used and did not appear to miss any steps. The velocity ramps were fantastic, and the knob was small in diameter and thereby easy to turn fast.
I could set a timer approximately with a quick, singular flick of my fingers, which was plenty good enough for most of my cooking. Setting a timer for about 20 or 30 minutes (or an hour, or whatever) was simple.
If I wanted to be precise, that was also simple: Get to the right neighborhood with a clockwise flick, and then just turn the dial a bit slower to work in tighter precision (down to 1 minute per encoder stop).
It takes a lot of words to describe, but it was intuitive AF in use.
The clock didn't drift much over time (it was synchronized to line frequency -- not perfect anymore, but pretty good).
Walltime was easy to set (for DST buggery or power outage), too: Same knob, still no buttons. Same excellent acceleration ramps. Just start with an anticlockwise flick, and it's setting the clock instead of the timer.
(Screw it up by twisting it the wrong way on initial rotation? It didn't matter much because the cost of resetting the clock was very, very low and the action of it felt like a pleasant release from modern human interface chicanery)
---
Clock on present-day oven also works, but it's crap. Pick a mode with a button. Set digits by holding or tapping up or down buttons. Accept input digits by pressing another button.
But tapping always only goes in 1-minute steps, which sounds nice except: The debounce is bad and it misses rapid taps. And holding it sounds nice, except: It always overshoots, by a lot -- the acceleration ramps are, to put it as kindly as I can, sadistic.
Setting the clock is miserable. The fastest and least-annoying way to adjust for DST is to mash the button 60 times at the right cadence: Too fast, and it misses inputs.
Too slow and it takes long enough that the motivation is to try the sadistic button-hold acceleration again (which will be uniformly punished by sending it even further away from the target than where it started).
I'd put black tape over the display (like a VCR from the 1980s) and forget about it, but: In a curse of integration-at-every-expense, this display is also used to set the temperature for the oven and I need that function.
Though if you prefer a portable one you can stuff in your pocket they have that too, and it also does just what it says on the tin.
That's fine if you need something to be in the microwave for a few minutes, but it absolutely sucks if you need something to be close to (or much less than) the period time... it's completely random and depending where the prior usage started, how much active time your ingredients experience.
It was programmable, too. 45 seconds on high, then 2 minutes at 50%? 45P5200S (where P is the Power button and S is Start).
I also found that nobody but me cared about any of that at all. Everyone else who ever used it always ran it at 100% power.
---
One of these days, I'll get another one that has variable power like this again. But it'll be a "flat bed" Toshiba, since the present lineup from Panasonic all includes spinning glass carousels and those have always been both stupid and unnecessary.
Is it? Or does Toshiba just mitigate the problem on the magnetron side? My impression was always that the spinning is a crude compensation for non-homogenous power density (preventing hot/cold spots), which makes sense to me (except if you're just heating soup or somesuch obviously).
In all cases, the magnetron emits a field that is somewhat akin to a modern flashlight in that it is directed (or a particularly fancy flashlight of yore), and it can be focused with some modicum of precision (or not). The emitted RF also bounces around inside the box like light does, and it therefore features standing wave interference patterns. So something has to move, or we get hot spots and cold spots (or perhaps even cold sides).
Carousels smooth things out by spinning the plate (and ultimately the food) around. It's easy to visualize: Just look through the door of any carousel oven in operation. (Shine a flashlight in there for extra effect.)
But (what are now called) flat bed microwaves achieve the same desirable distribution, and they do this with a rotating microwave stirrer. This spinnamathing also distributes the magnetron's RF output across the food being heated. This can be accomplished by deliberately bouncing the RF around in repeated patterns, or just disturbing the environment enough to mix up standing wave patterns, or both.
They're often shaped like metal fan blades. Sometimes, they're more-alien RF designs with deliberate ridges and/or holes. They're hidden in the top or bottom of the oven[1].
Microwave stirrers work very well. The mechanism is just invisible to the buyer while the carousel is very much visible.
And to be clear: The carousel also works. It just became the clear winner in the marketplace not because it was technologically advanced but because of buyer perception; it was easy to see, and therefore easy to sell. Microwave stirrers were (and are) much more hand-wavey.
But having scorched more than one bag of popcorn when it somehow got wedged and stopped spinning while I wasn't looking, I'd rather avoid spinning the food around. So that's how I endeavor.
[1]: The Kenmore we had when I was a kid had a mechanical timer (with a mechanical bell!) and an electromechanical speed knob (which I've come to understand was just a simmerstat like for an electric range), and the stirrer was at the top. It was metal, and fan shaped. It was hidden behind a plastic panel that was secured with little plastic pushpins fasteners. And that panel was somewhat translucent, so young-me could see that something was moving behind there.
I was little, curious, and unsupervised, so of course I took it apart. At first I was amazed that this microwave oven had metal inside of it and it had not yet caused a nuclear explosion and a black hole that wiped the entire galaxy out of existence. I figured the rest out over time.
The quasi-logarithmic idea is a good one. I would buy a simple one that just has a dial. No button required. But I agree with the other commenter that the 0-60 part would be quite useless for a kitchen timer. Better to have more resolution in the commonly used 0-30 minute range.