How Does Code Help With Heating Your Food in a Microwave?

What is a Microwave?

Microwaves are a convenient and quick way to cook food, defrost frozen food, or heat up leftovers. Since its introduction in the 1970s, the microwave has been touted as one of the most popular means of heating food.

How do Microwaves Work?

Microwaves are electromagnetic waves that are produced by an appliance. They are then absorbed by the food and converted into energy, which is used to heat up the food. The microwaves produce a “standing wave” of energy, which means they penetrate all parts of the food equally. This is why microwaves can be used for cooking, defrosting, or reheating foods.

How Have Microwave Devices Improved Over the Years?

Since their inception, there has been a massive improvement in microwave usage as far as the application goes. Nowadays, microwaves are not just used for heating purposes; with every new model introduced, their usage has become more versatile. Now you can cook your food in a microwave as well. Many new features have been added to the device over the years, and some common features are

1. Grilling
2. Convection
3. Automatic cleaning
4. Sensors
5. Automatic cooking
6. Steaming

Have you ever wondered what facilitates these features and what science goes behind them? The addition of these features, and many other features that may be added in the future, has been made possible because of technological developments and the use of more sophisticated and advanced coding. Recently, the demand for coders in the food industry has been rising. Coders are an integral part of this sector because they are responsible for making sure that all products are safe and compliant with all regulations. They are the minds behind the technology and programming that make microwave ovens work.

Coding also ensures that everything runs smoothly, with no hiccups or errors, which can be very costly if not avoided beforehand.

Microwave-based Coding

The hardware is one thing, but what really makes a microwave work? To answer that question, it is a set or series of codes that are programmed into the microwave that trigger the action that it is supposed to perform.

Let’s have a look at an example to help you understand. If Arun wants to heat his food for three minutes in a microwave, he will simply set the timer for three minutes and press the “Start” button. This start button will act as an “input command,” just like a command does on computers. When this command is fed, the code that is embedded in the microwave will read the command and run the code accordingly. The microwaves that are generated via a magnetron (an electron tube inside the oven) will heat the food. This heating process will be called “output.”

As we can decipher, a microwave is a slave to the codes that are already embedded into the system, and they act as the facilitator. Also, a microwave runs on “embedded systems” that have one single program that administers all the functions. The most common language used in microwave coding is C++. It is a general-purpose programming language that has many new features that make it more favorable than the C language. These include type safety, automatic memory management, data abstraction, inheritance, templates, exception handling, and support for object-oriented programming.

More Extensive Coding to Cater to Your Needs

The world today runs on codes. There is no industry that doesn’t require a technological push. Since its inception, software programming has come a long way. If you are interested in coding, then it is better to start with programs that cater to general-purpose applications such as a microwave. The first thing that you need to remember is that every step in the processing of a microwave runs on a code.

Through coding, you can learn to customize your microwave to meet your specific needs. To execute every action, you will have to feed a specific code and then test it. If the code works, the command was successfully executed. Then it is possible to progress to more sophisticated coding that will require extensive learning.

Final Thoughts

Assume you want to learn how to control your microwave from your computer or smartwatch. To be able to do that, you must first learn a software programming language. When you learn more sophisticated commands, you will be able to write a code that will connect your microwave to your device. That way, you can simply issue a command to your microwave, and it will perform the required action, such as heating up your food. That definitely sounds exciting and fascinating, isn’t it? And this is just one of many things made possible by programming.

Has reading this article piqued your interest in learning coding languages? Read more blogs like this on BYJU’S FutureSchool blog and let us know what you think.