AUTOMATIC RENTAL VENDING MACHINE

摘要

An automatic vending machine for the rental of video cassettes. Cassettes are stored in individual brackets (22) carried on a vertical conveyor belt (16). An indexing mechanism (41) indexes each bracket (22) and the code of the cassette therein is read by a bar code reader (35) and transmitted to a CPU (60). A service man randomly loads the machine and the reader (35) reads the codes of all the cassettes. A user inserts a credit card into slot (6) and selects a cassette using keyboard (10). The CPU moves the conveyor until a bracket holding the cassette is aligned with window (12). Upon return of the cassette, the user places the cassette in an empty bracket where it is subsequently moved to the reader to read the code thereon.