Using tiny, point-sized heating elements, the toaster burns a (mono) image taken with the built-in camera onto the toast!!!
Also prints e-mail (toast-mail?) messages. Remembers birthdays and anniversaries.-- horeas_parry, Jul 01 2004 Internet toaster http://news.bbc.co....ci/tech/1264205.stmToasts a weather symbol onto your bread. Uses stencils rather than a complex element. [st3f, Oct 04 2004] This now exists http://www.theguard...y-toasty-aberration [hippo, May 11 2016] croissant with a picture of a croissant on it for you.-- etherman, Jul 01 2004 Let me just burn that + up there for you.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jul 01 2004 I thought this was going to be a camera in a toaster to let you see how brown the toast was without spoiling the timing. I'm slightly disappointed, but I really do like this. Could you connect it to a computer? If so how would it be connected? USB? or would you have to keep the breakfast theme and go Cereal?-- silverstormer, Jul 01 2004 Didn't someone experiment a while back with an internet toaster that got the days weather from the internet and toasted an appropriate symbol onto your breakfast bread? I'll see if I can find a link... (a link appears).
I wonder how high a discernable resolution you can get out of the average slice of wholmeal.-- st3f, Jul 01 2004 I was thinking the same thing as [silverstormer], however a reminder of birthdays/aniversaries would be good. Maybe the date as well as I tend to forget that. +-- swimr, Jul 01 2004 i'm going to bun this... I forsee it now this morning my toast pops up it reads "happy birthday!" ^^ Atleast my toast remembered my birthday-- Urban Kayaker, Jul 02 2004 woot!!! i love it!!! >_> who needs a significant other when your toaster remembers stuff about you...i'll marry your toaster! [+]-- Robyn Silverwolfe, Jul 02 2004 ok, I'm for any thing that makes toast, so here is your buttery toastable, but since the camera is built into the toaster it will, for the most part, be limited to photos of things in the kitchen. Much as the first thing copied with any new copier is the manual, I want to burn the image of my untoasted bread into the toast. That or my face so I can see if I forgot to shave. For the Atkins dieters you could burn some distasteful image (assuming the image of a plain piece of bread is insufficiently disgusting to them.)
OH, and I have another application for this. Consider diners as the early adopters of your technology. In the restaurant trade there is, I am told, the convention that wait staff make their own toast to finish off breakfasts. Since they shouldn't stand around waiting for toast, there is the eternal problem of toast pilfering by other wait staff... So the Toast cam is aimed at the wait person who loads the bread. Now it is obvious who's toast it is. And the customers can stop bothering the wrong waiters as they have a handy little portrait on their plate. You could also burn in the waitperson's name too, I guess... "toasted for table 123 with love by Kitty, please pay your server..." solves two other problems this way, what was her name ("OH MISS!?/MS!?/HEY LAYDEEEE!") and how do I pay?-- DadManWalking, Jul 02 2004 hahahaha...one of the best ideas ever!!!
If you didn't mind a little burnt, you could have the full color range, from uncooked to black!
If a hot poker was run back and forth, lifting for light, and pressing down on the toast for dark, you could probably get reasonable resolution! Could have a small grid of needles than moved along the toast...pressing down whichever needles to complete that portion of the picture.-- nomel, Jul 02 2004 + I like this and I like toast. (I only recognize a few 'bakers' names here, if we had the toaster, we could see the others!)-- xandram, Jul 02 2008 Aha - I was more thinking along the lines of an inkjet type setup, with ink dots taken from various toast condiments. Say, yellow from lemon butter, black from vegimite, red from, um, a chutney of some description, green from gherkin spread - the possibilities are endless. I got all excited thinking that was it - a full colour edible ink printer for toast.
Your greyscale low resolution version is so like 80's.-- Custardguts, Jul 03 2008 I love it! I was going to buy a Hello Kitty toaster (toasts the image of Hello Kitty) but now i want one of these instead. It would be great if it had appointments for the day as well eg. Dentist 3pm today.-- penguin_tummy, Jul 03 2008 Awesome. This is not a toast cam. It's a toast printer.-- ixnaum, May 11 2016 random, halfbakery