VENDING MACHINE INCLUDING MULTIPLE HEAT SOURCES WITH PROGRAMMABLE COOK CYCLES

摘要

In accordance with the present invention, a vending machine (100) has one or more programmable cook cycles for use with one or more heat sources in cooking a food package to be dispensed to the customer. In one embodiment of this invention, each cook cycle includes a start time and a duration. Each cook cycle is associated with a heat source and a product code indicating the type of food to be cooked. Initially, cook cycles are copied into a random access memory (305) from default cook cycles hard coded in the software program code and stored in electrically erasable programmable read only memory (EEPROM) (306) of the vending machine controller (208). The cook cycles in RAM can be over written by an operator for the various type of foods to be cooked. The cook cycles in RAM are used by the vending machine (100) to automatically cook a food product selected by a customer, without any further inputs.