ACM Vending

About

The ACM Vending Interface was written as a Yahoo! HackU project in 2010 under the name "Machine-Controlled, Generic, Expandable Interface for Vending and Amusement Appliances" (McGeivaa). After losing the HackU competition, but winning an unrelated prize (the added-at-the-last-minute "White Hat" award), the API was renamed to something more appropriate and pronounceable and some things were cleaned up to make it more accessible.

http://acm.uiuc.edu/lug/vending/

Authors

ACM Vending was written by:

• Kevin Lange [email protected]
• Sean Nicolay [email protected]
• Dylan Nugent [email protected]
• Robby Schiele [email protected]

Installation

ACM Vending requires PML, a GPLv2 Python HTML templating engine. We have not provided this in the public release of ACM Vending as ACM Vending is released under the NCSA License as a University of Illinois RSO project. Sorry.

You can get PML here.

Application

As ACM Vending is an API, you will need to make an application out of it. A very simple default setup looks like this:

from vending import Db, Gui, Serial, Web, Vending
class Caffeine(Vending.Vending):
def start(self):
    Vending.Environment.tool = self
    self.serial = Serial.Serial()
    self.db = Db.MySQLBackend()
    self.web = Web.Server()
    self.gui = Gui.GraphicalInterface()
    Vending.Vending.start(self)
Caffeine().start()

Theme

You can redefine or extend the included modules as much as you want. Additionally, you will also need a theme set:

www/
    main.html
    gui/
        cancel.html
        cantafford.html
        confirm.html
        empty.html
        main.html
        user.html

Default examples of these are provided from the Caffeine project.

Configuration

Beyond the application and theme level, you will need to configure your application with a machine.conf. A sample machine.conf is provided under machine.conf.example. machine.conf lists the operable settings for your specific vending implementation, like the passwords for your databases and the commands to send to the machine itself, and the responses to expect.

Note that we can't cover all possible configurations here. ACM Vending was designed to work well with Caffeine, and uses its basic structure. If your machine is significantly different in what it expects on its serial line, you will need to edit Serial.py and possible Vending.py. If your database is sufficiently different, you will most definitely need to modify Db.py.

The format for the config file is:

option: value

... where value is in Python syntax. Note that this value is evald, so always make sure that your configuration is "safe".

API

The ACM Vending API seeks to provide a concise, but expandable, library for communicating with vending machines. The layout of the default library modules looks like this:

vending/
    Db.py             Database library (only MySQLBackend as of now)
    Gui.py            GUI library (only Qt with a web frontend)
    Serial.py         Serial interface (runs on a separate thread)
    Vending.py        The base class and logging
    Web.py            Web server (for GUI, web frontend, and initial telnet)

You are free to edit these library modules as much as you want, but we recommend that you extend them as your own set of classes instead.