| 摘要 |
The gold and precious metal buying machine and method has a housing, a vault and inboard processing stations for: weighing, detecting constituent elements with x-rays and measuring volume based upon gas or fluid displacement. Weight, elemental data and volume is used to calculate gold weight and discounted market value based upon exchange rate, gold weight and a discount factor. Market value is displayed and if accepted, the system generates payment instruction and vault storage command. A rejection negates the acceptance upon request or error signal and generates rejection command. Machine transports item to various stations and, upon the storage command to the vault, and upon rejection to the item return port in the housing. An air displacement test uses a processor measuring a differential volume and a chambered item at a different pressure by a differential position of a piston movable in the chamber. |
| 主权项 |
1. A machine for buying a gold-bearing item from a consumer comprising:
a housing structure having a vault within said housing; a portal in said housing leading inboard to a plurality of processing stations in the interior of said housing, said portal adapted to receive said gold-bearing item by the customer; said plurality of processing stations including: a weigh station to weigh said gold-bearing item and to generate representative weight data for the item; an x-ray spectrometer station wherein said spectrometer detects constituent elements present in said gold-bearing item and generates representative elemental data including gold elemental data; a volume measurement station for measuring the volume of said gold-bearing item based upon gas or fluid displacement in a chamber with said item, said volume measurement station generating volume data for the item; a display electronically coupled to a computer-based processor; said computer-based processor electronically obtaining said weight data, said gold elemental data and said volume data for the item and approximately calculating the amount of gold by weight in said item; said processor including: (a) means for determining a discounted market value for said gold-bearing item based upon predetermined exchange rate data, the approximated gold weight and at least one discount factor; (b) means for displaying said discounted market value for said gold-bearing item to the customer; (c) an acceptance module including means for accepting an offer to sell instruction from the customer and thereafter generating a payment instruction to compensate the customer and for generating a vault storage event command; (d) a rejection module adapted to negate said acceptance module upon either a customer's request or a detected error signal, said rejection module generating a rejection command; and, (e) an error module for generating the error signal based upon either a gold purity fault or a weight fault; a transport system, as part of the gold-buying machine, for delivering said gold bearing item to said weigh station, to said spectrometer station, to said volume measurement station and, upon said vault storage event command to deliver the item to said vault, and upon said rejection command to deliver the item to an item return port in said housing. |
