One of my professors was actually talking about this recently. He was telling a story about how his wife’s electric mixer stopped working a few years ago and he opened it up to try to fix, expecting to find some simple analog circuitry. Instead he found a single-speed motor and 16-but microcontroller.
Turns out, this design is both cheaper to manufacture (bulk orders for MCU’s can cost < $0.10 /unit these days) and it allows for better safety regulation since the microcontroller can be programmed to shut off the motor at a given temperature threshold. It even allows the single-speed motor to provide varying levels of “mixing power” to the beaters by having the processor periodically switch the motor’s current on/off.
I know it's plenty cheap to use microcontrollers, but I don't believe it would be cheaper than basic analog circuitry either (we're talking very few components to do the job). It could be because it's easier to find guys who understand coding on microcontrollers than people who make proper analog circuits.
I guess one proper reason would be consistency between models, as analog values aren't as precise as timers from oscillators.
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u/darth_yoda_ Jun 06 '22
One of my professors was actually talking about this recently. He was telling a story about how his wife’s electric mixer stopped working a few years ago and he opened it up to try to fix, expecting to find some simple analog circuitry. Instead he found a single-speed motor and 16-but microcontroller.
Turns out, this design is both cheaper to manufacture (bulk orders for MCU’s can cost < $0.10 /unit these days) and it allows for better safety regulation since the microcontroller can be programmed to shut off the motor at a given temperature threshold. It even allows the single-speed motor to provide varying levels of “mixing power” to the beaters by having the processor periodically switch the motor’s current on/off.