A toaster keyboard would be awesome if, like me, you have butter fingers.

Alas, USB can't carry enough power to toast bread.

Not with that attitude‡. A normal toaster uses about 1,000W, and a normal USB port is capable of 2.5W, which is 400 times less than the need.

First we make it a one-slice toaster, which cuts the requirement to 500W. We then apply advanced design and engineering principles to make the toaster more efficient. This may include an enclosure that better traps heat (but allows moisture to be drawn away from the bread). Or more carful placement of the heat elements to ensure that no heat is being wasted out the slot. Parabolic reflectors behind the heating elements can focus more heat energy directly to the bread slice. Lasers may even be involved.

All of these tweaks will drops the requirement to, say, 250W.

Still a ways to go, we decide to accept a longer toasting time in exchange for lower power requirements. Instead of heating elements covering both surfaces of the bread slice, we decide to have a single element on a track, moved by a stepper motor. This will toast the bread in sections instead of all at once. Think of the difference between a traditional camera and a flatbed scanner. This allows us to use a fraction of the power. Call it 50W. The toasting time will increase to 12 minutes, but if people like crock pots, then they'll love this.

Add 10% for the rest of the device and we'll need 55W.

So now we're at about 20x our ability. But wait! USB3 is common enough, that we can require it. USB3 can supply 4.5W, making our gap now 12x. There isn't any more power savings I can think of, so now we'll cheat by placing an onboard battery in the toaster/keyboard. The battery only needs to output 55W, so a single 20A lithium-ion cell will work. If we're estimating a 12-minute toast time, that's 11 watt-hours. An 18650 battery cell can provide roughly 11 watt-hours.

For only $129.99, you can have a keyboard with all the convenience of your kitchen. (Cherry switches are extra.)

‡ Yes, you're still right, it can't carry the power to toast bread. But the energy is there :)

Surely USB type C should be able to handle the job

Not sure if you're joking or not, but USB type C is max. 100 W, while a toaster is typically > 1000 W.

Thank you, you just added another piece to my write up[1]. I was limiting myself to USB3 for some reason...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11413607

Does that mean that you can remove the cheating battery? Yaay!

Seems yesterdays April Fools joke from Razer wasn't that far fetched after all. Coincidence, but still.

http://www.razerzone.com/breadwinner

Because it's full of breadcrumbs ?

I think I had more crumbs in my old Mac keyboard than in my current toaster.

Toasting in an epic bread.

This has some sort of meta-ironic value now that the "Internet of Things" is a thing: Is my keyboard being recognized as a toaster, or is my toaster being recognized as a keyboard??

The Internet connected toaster was first created 26 years ago by Australian ISP, Internode, founder Simon Hackett.[1][2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Hackett 2. http://www.internode.on.net/about/our_history/

How to mod any toaster to control pc games in 3 easy steps. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI7tWd7B3iI

It took me way to long to get that it was a joke.

I go to school with that fella

The other interesting connotation is in Battlestar Galactica: cylons (and by extension all AI) are derogatorily referred to as toasters. Your comment kind of brings it all together.

So, the joke is the software developer for the driver copied the example driver code a little too literally? I guess seeing a toaster icon is as good a way as any of having a flag to tell you to watch out with this driver.

Probably not the code, though it's true that everyone starts with the toaster sample, there's not enough functionality in it to make it an easy walk to a HID filter driver, which is what's probably installed for your average white box USB keyboard. Plus there's (IIRC, it's been a couple of years) a specific sample for that in the WDK. Most likely they did copy/paste the device metadata from that sample.

So, keyboard OEM's contract devs whip up a HID filter driver, but they c/p the sample metadata and forget to change the DeviceIcon entry. Now we could imagine their testing process involved little more than jacking it in and rattling the keys, but if they were developing or testing on anything previous to Win 7 (I think) then if they'd checked they'd have seen a generic icon based on device class.

But still, the code they wrote is running in the ring zero, so yeah, we'd prefer them to systematically carefull.

I heard Fabrikam makes good toasters! Among thousands of other random things...

Fun fact: Wikipedia has a list of all Microsoft acquisitions since Fabrikam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_Microsoft_co...

All these years and 'Northwind Traders' still gives me the fear!

Weren't they bought out by Contoso?

Does anyone know if they have redesigned the icon in Windows 10?

The real question is whether said keyboard is HTCPCP compliant.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8136279.

I'm seriously thinking this should be a real thing. I mean, what could be better right now, while typing away at the next big thing, than to have some toast. Clearly unicorn. Right?

It's not a keyboard, it's actually a transformer.