Eli5: What does it take to make an everyday object programmable? Is it inserting a CPU in it?
In: Technology
TLDR: no, cpu doesn’t exclusively mean programmable
Let’s start with “stick a CPU in it.” If you took a CPU and stuck it in a marshmallow, is the marshmallow now programmable? No, because simply sticking a processor in an object does nothing.
Conversely, there are lots of objects that are programmable that don’t need a CPU. A mechanical music box is a great example of this. If you change the pinned wheel, you get a different song.
What makes a music box programmable and a marshmallow not? Well, let’s look at what’s music is: a set of instructions to Do A Specific Thing At A Specific Time. The gearing makes sure the pinned wheel moves at a fixed (ish) speed, and the pins engage the tuned teeth. Each tick of the gears, a new thing happens: either “proceed” or “proceed and hit tooth X”.
Making anything programmable requires breaking down what it does into simple steps that can be reproduced with machinery, be it mechanical like the music box, electromechanical like an old Wurlitzer or a pinball machine, or electronic.
What does it take for a toaster to be programmable? Break down what a toaster does: bread goes down, elements heat up, bread goes up. So at a minimum, you need to a) identify when to start, either by actively pushing the bread into the machine or flipping a switch to make the toaster do so; b) turn on the heating elements for a certain amount of time; c) turn off the elements when the time is up; d) get the toasted bread out of the machine. (Obviously I’m oversimplifying.)
You can program a small computer to do this, but you can also use analog signals to do the work. For example, you can have your processor count down 120 seconds, but you also could have a simple thermocouple, two pieces of different metals that expand differently under heat, turn the toaster off when it gets “too hot” by breaking an electrical connection.
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