Restoration Of A Self-Crêpe Machine

March 18, 2016 by Jenny List 23 Comments

A few years ago [Tweepy], one of the Hackaday readership’s global band of pancake enthusiasts, took possession of an aged “Self-Crêpe” machine. Judging by the look of the date codes on the ICs in the early 1980s, this machine cooked and sold a fresh crêpe on the insertion of a 1 Franc coin (about 17 U.S. cents in those days) for about thirty years.

Sadly, it would no longer produce crêpes. The aged control logic was the culprit, and rather than debug it [Tweepy] decided to replace it with a microcontroller (French language, Google Translate link). The one he chose (marked “RSF2127″, can anyone identify it?) came in a QFP package, so attaching it to a 0.1” prototyping board required some soldering wizardry with fine wires, but it was soon up and running. Some track-cutting and wiring into the original PCB, and the custom C code was ready to go.

The crêpe-making part of the machine features a heated roller not unlike the one in our recently featured South African endless pancake machine in whose comment thread [Tweepy] mentioned it, but appears to use only a single-sided cooking process. The roller has a round crêpe-sized raised area. To start the cooking process, a loading bath of batter is brought up under the roller which is then rotated so that the round raised area passes through the surface of the batter. As the roller turns, it cooks the crêpe, which is then diverted from the roller to the output chute. The whole process relies on a reservoir of pre-made batter, sadly it’s not a crêpe replicator. On the other hand, a single crêpe takes about 40 seconds to create, and the machine can produce them on a continuous basis as long as you keep it stocked with batter.

We like the crêpes, we like the machine, and we like what [Tweepy] has done with it. If any of these machines made it beyond the borders of France, we’ve never seen one in our corners of the Anglophone world. This is a shame, for who wouldn’t want one of those next to the kettle and microwave oven in their hackspace! They would have needed to work on that name, though, for the English-speaking market.

We’ve recently done a round-up of pancake-related hacks here at Hackaday, so there is no point in repeating it. This is however not the first vending machine hack we’ve seen. There was this stealth-upgraded soda dispenser, this Tweeting beer dispenser, or how about this open-source software machine that definitely didn’t vend.

Sniffing Vending Machine Buses

April 18, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 13 Comments

We’ve talked about a variety of protocols and how to deal with them in the past. Today, [Dan] is working on sniffing vending machine Multidrop Bus. The Multidrop Bus (MDB) protocol is a standard used in vending machines to connect devices such as currency collectors to the host controller.

To connect to the bus, interface hardware is required. [Dan] worked out compliant hardware and connected it to an Arduino. With the device on the bus, [Dan] got to work on an Arduino sketch to parse the MDB data into a human-readable format. With that working, the bus can easily be sniffed over the Arduino’s serial console.

This is just the start of a more involved project. Since this protocol is used to communicate with a vending machine’s currency collector or card reader, being able to communicate it would allow him to implement his own payment methods. The plan is to augment the vending machine he operates at Vancouver Hack Space to accept Bitcoin. We’re looking forward to seeing that project unfold.

A Bitcoin Vending Machine

September 13, 2013 by Marsh 21 Comments

bitcoinVendingMachine

Accessibility is one of the biggest hurdles facing the Bitcoin revolution, so [Mathias] found a way to give BTCs some market penetration by converting an old condom vending machine. The machine was 30 years old and required some clean up. [Mathias] also worked in a plywood adapter that attaches to the mount on the back so it can install on a wider variety of surfaces. This is an electricity-free alternative to selling coins: the machine is purely mechanical and it vends custom-made vouchers rather than the coins themselves, which you then redeem on the Kondocoin website.

The transaction isn’t as instant or snazzy as the Bitcoin briefcase converter from Defcon this year, but it still provides the advantage of an up-to-date exchange rate, as the vouchers themselves are valued at amount of Euros spent rather than a set amount of coins. The exchange rate is consulted later, when you punch in your voucher key. [Mathias] wants to share the wealth, too, and offers up the server software on github along with a detailed explanation of the process.

Robot Steals Soda From The Vending Machine

March 27, 2013 by Mike Szczys 45 Comments

robot-steals-soda

It’s very hard to tell from this photo because of the super bright blue LEDs, but this soda machine is being robbed by a robot.

We don’t condone theft, but neither does the creator of the project. [Ioduremetallique] is really just problem solving; doing something because he can. And we’d bet this type of thing will end up landing him a high-paying job some day (we’re assuming he’s currently in school).

The project is shown off in the video after the break. The gist of it is that a compact robot arm is put into the drop area of a vending machine. After the flap is closed the wired remote control is used to raise up the telescoping arm, and grip the soda can with the grippers. It’s brilliant and devious all at the same time. The entire video is in French, but the YouTube captions translator actually worked quite well with this video. To turn it one, use the ‘CC’ icon on the bottom of the video. We had to select the French captions before it would allow us to chose English from the translated captions list. About four minutes in we get a great look at the hardware itself… a super hack!

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Rube-Goldberg Provides Liquid Refreshment

February 19, 2013 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

rube-goldberg-soda-machine

The image to the left doesn’t make this look like much, but inside of the cardboard vending machine lives a clever Rube-Goldberg device. The video after the break gives a look at the inner workings to show how a quarter manages to dispense a full can of Coke. But that’s about all the detail we get on the project.

There are two sets of counterweights used in the design. Some marbles, and what look like giant pinballs. The coin chute, located on the left side of the venting machine, funnels the money into the waiting marble. When the marble rolls off it lands on a spoon. The weight rotates the spoon-filled disk and causes one of the waiting pinballs to drop from their rack. As that metal ball falls it operates a ratcheting system to dispense just one can. It looks like the capacity of the machine is limited to two refreshing cans of sugary liquid, but that could be scaled up if more room were made for cans and counterweights alike.

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Tweeting Beer Dispenser Requires Co-worker Approval

February 1, 2013 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

Having been faced with an empty beer fridge one too many times the team at Metalworks came up with an approval system for dispensing malted beverages. The trick was to remove the physical controls on a can dispenser. The only way you can get a cold one is to ask the machine via its twitter account. If there’s beer inside, it waits for one of your approved co-workers to give the go-ahead.

There are two versions of the machine. The first is a hacked refrigerator with a dispenser hole cut in the door. This resides in their Sydney office, apparently doesn’t work all that well, and is only shown in the video after the break.

The image above is version 2.0 which is located at their Singapore branch. It’s a much smaller device, but works very well since it started as a commercially available can dispenser. You can see the Arduino Leonardo and breadboard which make up the driver circuits.

There aren’t a ton of details on this, but it’s not hard to find about a million examples of an Arduino using Twitter. Here’s one that takes Morse code as an input and posts the message as a Tweet.

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