[tech] Re: several messages

[Mark Tearle]

On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Andrew Williams wrote:

> On Fri, 15 Jun 2001 11:00:56 +0800 (WST), Mark Tearle wrote:
>
> >
> >Offers of assistance from Adrian Chadd, James Devenish, John West and
> >Chris Thorp :)  Cool some momentum ...
>
> >A good vending abstraction layer is probably a good project though,
> >with perhaps an implementation of IOTP (Internet Open Trading Protocol)
> >to do the dispense credit type stuff.
>
> If you're planning a project that will be useful for other vending
> machines, it's a better idea to make the hardware too - documenting how
> you've burned a ROM for this particular microcontroller and
> implementation won't be very useful.

Depends which way you look at it and where you draw the lines between
the bits - a vending machine could be simply modelled as:

	slot, thing, price, empty?

Bad ascii art to follow:


Vending              Vend
Machine  ---glue---  Daemon   ---vend protocol--- Front      ----  client
Hardware                                          End Daemon
                                                     |
						     |
                  Accounting System  -----IOTP-------+

> So - who's going to turn up to UCC tonight and talk about vending
> machine stuff?
>
> Andrew

I'll be there till just after pizza....

Yours
Mark
-- 
Mark Tearle - mark at tearle.com

 "The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance." - Socrates