Vender – An internet controlled classic vending machine

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An internet controlled classic vending machine

A few months ago I picked up a functioning old soda machine off craigslist. This machine was built in 1977 and has been comfortably vending soda the same way for over 30 years. Thats boring, lets make this retro machine a little more modern!

Vender has its credit functions, and dispense button electronically controlled and has two capacitive touch sensors to dispense free soda if you know the secret place to put your hands. It also has a police beacon light atop of it to signal when someone remotely dispenses a can. All of this is on a platform connected the internet, enabling operation from a website (buyusbeer.com) or my iPhone! It makes for a great living room decoration, and always serves up ice cold soda (and beer).

Since I’m moving out and traveling this summer, me and my roommates are selling Vender on eBay. A portion of the sale goes to support the Kiva foundation. Check it out.

Technical Overview

Control Board

Here’s the Phidget 8/8/8 control board at the heart of Vender. This is used to send signals to the relays, and to react to the input from the touch sensors. The control board is connected to an old P4 computer I was able to scrounge up around MIT. The computer runs all the code that lets Vender interact with the internet.

iPhone Control

Somewhat like my door, Vender can be controlled from my iPhone. I have two buttons on my home screen, ‘Soda’ and ‘Beer’ that perform their respective functions. This is the easiest way to dispense from the machine! Though a number of times I have pushed it while I’m away only to find a warm beer sitting sitting in the machine when I come back.

Credit Relay

Wires going in to the credit pins

Vending machines from this era all equipped with Jones plugs between the coin mechanism and the rest of the machine. The coin mechanism handles the tricky task of accepting money and giving back change, and then just tells the rest of the machine when a soda has been paid for. After trolling the soda-machines.com forums, I learned that to establish credit you just need to momentarily connect pins 1 and 7 on the plug. I snaked two wires to these pins and then connected them with a relay operated from the control board. The original coin mechanism is still plugged in.

Button Relays

Button Relays

The button relays are a bit less elegant. After finding the electrical diagram of the machine from the manufactures website (thanks Fawn Vending Systems!), I cut and stripped the wires coming out of each button’s microswitch. Then I spliced in another loop through a relay so that I can simulate a button press from the control board. The microswitches are still connected so the buttons still works otherwise.

Touch Sensors

Touch Sensor

Behind the front panel are two Phidget touch sensors based on the QT110 chip. These sensors works by detecting small variations in capacitiance caused by something like a human finger. They work through any dielectric material (in this case plastic) and don’t require actual touch, only proximity of about 1/4 inch. With the light off on Vender their presence behind the plastic isn’t noticeable.

BuyUsBeer.com

Vender in Buy Us Beer mode

My roommates (Tom and Jonathan) put together a website and hooked Vender up the general internet at http://buyusbeer.com . Here we stream a live video of our living room and the machine. You can pay $1, see a countdown before the beer comes out, and then watch us drink it. We’re operating it on friday nights and its been surprisingly popular among our friends as well as the reddit community. We don’t really make any money off it, especially considering paypal takes 30cent from every dollar, but we’ve sold a surprising amount of beer.

Finally…

Me and all my roommates are moving out in a few weeks, so we’re putting the vending machine, electronics, and buyusbeer.com website/domain on ebay. %10 of the sale is going to Kiva. If you’re curious, check out the sale at eBay.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch at chris@varenhor.st. You can also find me on twitter @varenc

53 Comments / Leave a comment

Sean Graham on May 21st, 2010 - 8:21 am

When I went to RIT I lived on Computer Science House. One of CSH’s long-standing projects is “Drink”, which has gone through many iterations over the past 25ish years. The most recent incarnation is actually 3 vending machines (Big Drink, Little Drink, and Snack). I was actually part of the group who started this incarnation, after the previous versions hardware started failing (It was based on some old DECstation 5000s and some custom hardware, which was getting difficult to replace/repair at the time).

The control hardware is presently based on the DalSemi TINI platform and uses various one-wire switches and devices for control and sensing. There are iButton sensors on the front of the machines so you can login in front of the machine, and there is a (reasonably) well-defined protocol so clients of any kind are able to connect, monitor and control the machine. There are web clients, command-line clients, a telnet interface, dashboard widgets, java, etc…

Some (possibly out of date) documentation on the hardware and software is here:

http://www.antiduh.com/drink/

And the code is available here:
http://github.com/danw/drink
http://github.com/adinardi/csh-drink-touchscreens
http://github.com/adinardi/csh-drink-tini

Good luck with your project!
Sean Graham on May 21st, 2010 - 8:22 am

When I went to RIT I lived on Computer Science House. One of CSH’s long-standing projects is “Drink”, which has gone through many iterations over the past 25ish years. The most recent incarnation is actually 3 vending machines (Big Drink, Little Drink, and Snack). I was actually part of the group who started this incarnation, after the previous versions hardware started failing (It was based on some old DECstation 5000s and some custom hardware, which was getting difficult to replace/repair at the time).

The control hardware is presently based on the DalSemi TINI platform and uses various one-wire switches and devices for control and sensing. There are iButton sensors on the front of the machines so you can login in front of the machine, and there is a (reasonably) well-defined protocol so clients of any kind are able to connect, monitor and control the machine. There are web clients, command-line clients, a telnet interface, dashboard widgets, java, etc…

Some (possibly out of date) documentation on the hardware and software is here:

http://www.antiduh.com/drink/

And the code is available here:
http://github.com/danw/drink
http://github.com/adinardi/csh-drink-touchscreens
http://github.com/adinardi/csh-drink-tini

Good luck with your project!

sean
admin on May 21st, 2010 - 7:15 pm

Cool work sean! A living group at MIT has soda machine equipped with logins as well. You can see some cool graphs of it at http://sodalord.mit.edu/, not sure if its been documented though.
Ray Hernandez on Apr 5th, 2011 - 1:04 pm

This is pretty awesome. I want to put one of these in my house, minus the buy a drink for me part. Would you be willing to provide the code-setup for this in detail?

Thanks in advance!
Kary Ockerman on May 19th, 2011 - 2:56 am

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Mr. Rajesh Dudhait on Nov 28th, 2011 - 1:09 am

I like to have system for remote data reader of vending machine by GSM Mobile.

I want daily(every 24 hour) one time data of vending machine uses.

Please advise system.

Thanks

Best regards

Rajesh
Willem van Doesburg on Jan 7th, 2012 - 3:19 pm

Sean, great project. I would be really interested if you could put up a more detailed build instruction.

I’m collecting build instructions for makers, i’ve included your project at http://www.iot-maker.nl.

Regards
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Vender – An internet controlled classic vending machine

An internet controlled classic vending machine

Technical Overview

53 Comments / Leave a comment

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