Creating a Vending Machine with Lego Mindstorm

Creating a Vending Machine with Lego Mindstorm

Abstract:

Vending machines have come a long way, since their introduction to human society

thousands of years ago. Although the basic concept of a vending machine has not

changed, modern day technology has significantly enhanced them. Our vending machine

is no different. Although our vending machine is not top of the line, it is also not such a

bad one either. We started out with building the five main components of a vending

machine: the dispenser, trough, selection device, and payment reader entirely out of

LEGOs. We decided on a door like dispenser and buttons as a selection device. The

payment we decided to accept were barcodes. The only component that was actually

giving us trouble was the dispenser. Our first dispenser design was severely flawed.

After coming up with a door like mechanism, the dispenser was easily fixed. Although

we did prove our hypothesis to be correct, there are still many improvements that we

could make such as improving the design to make it easier to maintain.

Question:

Is it possible to create an operational candy machine with only LEGOs?

Purpose:

To build a candy machine that is capable of:

· Reading a barcode

· Detecting if it is a fake or not

· Sending a signal to the other RCX to allow to user to:

1) Select the candy

2) While making sure that the machine remains stationary

Background:

The History of Counterfeiting the US Currency

The counterfeiting of money is one of the oldest crimes in history. Therefore I

needed to find out the ways I could use a LEGO RCX to recognize a correct bill

and reject it if it is fake.

The History:

During the American Revolution, the British counterfeited U.S. currency in such

large amounts that the Continental currency soon became worthless. "Not worth a

Continental" became a popular expression that is still heard today.

During the Civil War, one-third to one-half of the currency in circulation was

counterfeit. At that time, approximately 1,600 state banks designed and printed

their own bills. Each bill carried a different design, making it difficult to detect

counterfeit bills from the 7,000 varieties of real bills.

A national currency was adopted in 1862 to resolve the counterfeiting problem.

However, the national currency was soon counterfeited and circulated so

extensively that it became necessary to take enforcement measures. Therefore, on

July 5, 1865, the United States Secret Service was established to suppress the

wide-spread counterfeiting of this nation's currency.

Although the counterfeiting of money was substantially suppressed after the

establishment of the Secret Service, this crime still represents a potential danger

to the Nation's economy.