Blenders to facilitate the processing of food, drinks, and other blended food preparations, have become ubiquitous in both commercial and residential settings. Such appliances are particularly useful where there are a variety of operations to be performed repeatedly with accuracy and precision.
Because changes in user taste or preference occur, the ability to create and store customized blending sequences provided by the blender has come about. A blending sequence is the unique manner in which a user may increase and/or decrease the speed of the motor, as well as the adjustment of any other user adjustable features provided by the blender over time or with regard to any other suitable parameter. Typically, modification or addition of new blending sequences required that the blender be physically returned to the manufacturer where it was disassembled and reprogrammed. This process resulted in a tremendous inconvenience to users, thus making such blenders unattractive to potential buyers.
Furthermore, as blender technology has progressed, user selectable motor speed controls and timers have been incorporated into blenders to obtain greater consistency between each blended preparation. However, even with such controls, the primary obstacle in receiving and sharing data to consistently create blended preparations, such as blended drinks, still remain and the user is required to adjust the motor speed consistently each time a blending sequence is performed or input data using a cumbersome wire data transfer.
Recently, advances in semiconductor memories have made it feasible for blenders to include memories in which the varying motor speed and operating intervals of the blender required for making a blended preparation may be stored. Typically, these programmable blenders read information regarding a blending sequence that has been encoded by an external programming device onto a magnetic strip adhered to a plastic card. As such, these devices require an external device such as a computer to enter, modify or duplicate the drink programs maintained by the plastic card. However, the component costs necessitated by such a system often make a blender incorporating such features extremely expensive. Furthermore, keeping track of the various program cards used with such a system is generally tedious, as the cards are easily misplaced.