| 摘要 |
A solution comprising cost-effective methods and techniques for upgrading a traditional vending machine to a state-of-the-art vending machine with one or more of: mobile phone payment, telemetry, remote adjustment, graphical user interface, advertisement, intelligent energy management, hardware abstraction layer with common Application Programming Interface. A key aspect of this invention is that the original Vending Machine Controller board is not replaced in the vending machine and will still perform the normal vending operations as before. Another aspect of this invention is that the additional features are added to the vending machine at the processor level of the VMC board, by removing the original microcontroller on the VMC board and replacing it with an FPGA board or an electronic board, that can be plugged in the existing microcontroller socket on the VMC board, giving the application miming on the FPGA board or the electronic board access to all elements connected to the vending machine controller. The present invention uses In-Circuit Emulation techniques, modified emulated microcontroller peripherals, an emulated switch matrix circuit or a generic processor to add additional features to the vending machine at the processor level of the VMC board. The methods and techniques of the invention can be used to provide an abstraction layer above the underlying vending hardware with a common Application Programming Interface for controlling and monitoring the upgraded vending machine, to nm common interactive applications on different vending machine brands and types. |
