| 摘要 |
A vending machine containing one or more racks that contain stacked products to be vended to customers. An array of capacitive switches or capacitive switches are aligned on one or more racks. The capacitive switches are each aligned with the height of a product to be vended. A controller coupled to the array of capacitive switches senses the presence or lack thereof of a product in the rack, and correlates this presence or absence to a height and/or inventory count of products in the racks. The vending machine, using the controller and communication electronics, may communicate the height and/or inventory count of products in the racks to a device located outside of the vending machine, such as a hand-held computing device and/or a management system, over a communication link.
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