Low-Wattage Rasterized Scanning Toaster

There is, or soon will be, a massive need for low-wattage toasters.

I was going to leave that as an unsupported statement, because it is so obvious. However, since a couple of people will object, here is the rationale. The idea of living "off-the-grid" with all electricity being generated by alternate sources (solar, wind, hydro, refuse fermentation, what-have-you) is becoming more popular. Many of these alternate sources are not good at handling "peak" loads. Go around your house and see what wattages everything uses. You'll find that dropping two slices of bread into the slots and pressing will result in a "peak load" in many cases.

So... how to produce toast with only five watts of input power? Simple. Don't toast the whole thing at once.

The idea of a toaster is fairly simple - it involves taking a pre-cooked bread item, and using radiant energy on the un-crusted cut sides to accomplish two tasks: first, driving off some of the moisture, resulting in a more rigid, less flexible slice of bread; second, partially carmelizing the sugars contained in the bread, tremendously enhancing the flavors thereof.

Take the five watts of input power. Use it to drive a one-watt infrared laser. This is mounted on a stepper-motor driven scanning frame. Pointed upwards at an angle, the beam strikes a pivoting mirror; its slow eccentric drive moves the beam back and forth bi-directionally across individual scan lines.

A one-watt laser is a pretty powerful dot - you can easily produce a line pitch of 8 lines per inch, and should not be a problem, with carefully designed optics, to go as low as 5 lpi. (The lower the resolution, the fewer times you have to scan across the bread, yeilding a quicker toast.)

After finishing one side, conveyor teeth pick up one edge of the half-toast and lift it up to the apex of the triangle form of the frame. Then a similar set drags the bottom edge across, from which position the top falls down the unsupported side, completing the flip.

You'd expect your toast to come out cold. It would, were it not for the fact that the toaster is sealed and insulated. Over the course of the cycle, the waste heat in the scan chamber is captured and keeps the toast from cooling.

You'd also expect your toast to be dried to mega-crouton-ness. Again, no, because of the seal. In fact, this would lead to soggy toast, but for the inclusion of a pair of dessicant cartridges - one of which is actively absorbing the moisture from the chamber (to a user settable level), while the other is recharging in the waste heat from the laser pump drive on the outside of the chamber. The exchange of cartridges is lever actuated every time you open and close the chamber.

As mentioned, the final moisture level is user controllable, as are the exposure settings, margins, and single-side / double-side toasting. A bit of additional hardware and software may lead to low-resolution printing or copy capabilities.

Since this will take a while, there is a piezo reminder alarm to let you know when the toast is up.