I'm sick of the stupid vending machine, so I'm going to make it do
things. I need one volunteer to help me with building a controller and
putting the damn thing together, but I can do all the software.
ELECTRICAL SPECS
There are 25 relays that connect to the motors that drive the spinny
things, they run off of 5 volts. (There are actually 32 of them but
only 25 spinny things, so.) They APPEAR to all be wired up already to
the spinny things, so we just need to turn each motor on for however
long we need to.
The keypad is a 5x5 grid of chained switches, so there are 10 outputs
and each switch turns on two of them. From those two you get grid
coordinates telling you what button is pushed.
There's an Arduino Mega sitting in the thing not connected to anything;
no idea what software may or may not be on it. But it has 30 or so
digital pins and 15 analog inputs, so it should work.
A display. There's a SainSmart 2004 I2C LCD sitting in the thing, specs
here:
http://www.sainsmart.com/sainsmart-iic-i2c-twi-serial-2004-20x4-lcd-module-shield-for-arduino-uno-mega-r3.html
There's also a couple random display modules sitting in the thing that I
don't recognize.
WHAT WE NEED
A sane front panel
A bunch of electrical connection work
A panel to bolt all the electrical stuff to
A couple multiplexers would probably make the wiring easier; as it is we
might not have enough pins on the Mega to drive the display along with
everything else.
Coin accepter. Forget about it for now; maybe someday when we have the
shop accounting system we can make it work with that.
PROPOSAL:
We drive the thing with the Arduino Mega and just get the thing working.
Honestly an RPi might make a better controller 'cause then we could
connect it to the internet and whatever shop accounting system we end up
using, but the software really isn't the hard part, so that can happen
later.
This is all also on a wiki page here:
http://www.hackpittsburgh.org/wiki/index.php?title=Vending_Machine
Thoughts?
Simon
