How Do Vending Machines Sell Things?

More and more vending machines appear in public places such as streets, stations, squares, shopping malls and so on. People often ask how does a vending machine work? How does it sell things automatically?

In fact, the working principles of different types of vending machines are very different, and the technologies used are different. Today I will talk about the working principles of the most common coin vending machines, that is, traditional vending machines. 

There are three main types of this type of vending machines: control circuits, coin slot, and goods delivery mechanisms.

1. The customer puts coins or banknotes into the coin slot. The coin slot recognizes the value and authenticity of the coin. If it is a fake coin, it will be spit out for rejection. In this process, the coin dispenser will pass the information of the received cash to the control circuit.

2. The customer selects the product through the button or metal keypad, and the control circuit compares the price with the amount of cash received according to the information sent by the coin acceptor. If the amount is sufficient, it will send a signal to the goods delivery mechanism to ship the goods. If it is insufficient, the customer will be notified that the amount is insufficient through the LED digital tube of the fuselage.

3. The cargo channel shipping mechanism receives the shipping signal from the control circuit and turns on the motor to drive the spring spiral cargo channel to rotate and ship.

4. After the shipment is completed, if the amount received is equal to the price of the product, the shopping is over. If the amount received is greater than the price of the product, the unmanned vending machine is waiting for further operation by the customer. If the customer continues to select the goods, the unmanned vending machine continues the above process. If the customer chooses to change, the main control circuit Add and subtract from the price of the product, and send the difference to the coin acceptor. The coin acceptor will change the coin according to the information sent by the main control circuit. At this point, the shopping ends.

In this process, if the unmanned vending machine is not connected to the Internet, all sales data will be stored locally; if the unmanned vending machine is connected to the network, it will upload the sales data to The background server, the vending machine administrator can log in to the background management account to view the sales situation of the vending machine anytime, anywhere, and the management is more convenient.

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