[Opendispense] It lives.

[Bernard Blackham]

Another braindump.

All the peripherals are more or less well behaved and talkative.

mtearle suggested that we embed the source code into the ROM so that
it won't be lost in 20 years time. I've done so, and even better,
the ROM has a (yet untested) feature to download the source via
xmodem out the serial line :)

The ROM features helpful help screens, computer & human parseable
responses, amongst other strange oddities :)

All keys, switches and buttons are read, and notification is
directly sent to the serial console.

There is a 'standalone mode' when you flip one of the DIP switches
that allows the vending machine to operate without a computer (with
a dead coin mech, this means everything is free).

The problem of the motors claiming the home sensors was failing
occasionally was actually not a bug in the motors code at all. It
was a bug in my assembly delay routine - the delay time (in ms)
would always be one less than specified, so a delay of 1ms was
actually no delay at all. Hence the motors never had time to get
away. I haven't confirmed this yet, but will do so tomorrow.

Need to get writing dispense2.

Finally, I'm about to call for ideas for authentication on the ucc
list...

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham <bernard at blackham dot com dot au>