Using a smartphone as a development board

Why do you need Java to run a vending machine?

Do you need a card acceptor and how is it connected to the VMC (Vending Machine Controller)?

What transaction values are you expecting? If it is for the GUI, consider separating the GUI from the VMC. There are plenty of cheap GUI/Media Player engines.

How many are you going to make per year?

Most vending machine fraud is caused by the people who empty and restock the machines. Some big companies don't know where tens of thousands of their machines actually are. If you really want to commit fraud, you steal the machine and put it somewhere else.

Stephen

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Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@mpeforth.com
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
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Stephen Pelc
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Why, if you have a power cord, are you so concerned about power use? Is this just so you can call the product "green"? Do you have some other functional reason to do so? The WiFi hub at my house has a 5V, 1A wall wart, which means that it consumes no more than 5 watts, peak -- is that 'power hungry' in your lexicon?

If you're really just talking prototype, then maybe a phone is the way to go. But I'd add up _all_ the costs of using a phone for a prototype. Don't just say "the phone's cheaper than a PC-104 processor board" and run with it -- add up _all_ the costs of building this around a phone, the add up _all_ the costs of building this around at least one other good-looking candidate, if not two or three. Then you can make an informed choice.

Are you going to run the vending machine on batteries? Has anyone done the work to verify that that's going to work? Most of the vending machines that I have experience are pretty clunky in their operation, and clunky = energy use.

Start doing research, and listing what you need, then. You can't do processor selection until you know what it needs to do.

A touch screen, per se, doesn't consume many CPU cycles. The windowing system that it implies can, depending on how you go about it.

An MMU does not necessarily imply speed. And if speed is a concern, why do you want to bog your application down using Java?

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Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
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Tim Wescott

Java does not require VM.

Too lazy to code in C++?

Java was designed (in the stone ages) to run on smaller platforms than C++. But to sell Java, they have to bloat it up with GUI. The result is Android.

Reply to
linnix

So credit card companies can eat away your margin?

Transaction fee with a telephone wired POS: 5-7%

plus design and certification cost to start.

Transaction fee with internet POS: 0.5-3%

In a market where the margin is around 30% (after insurance, maintenance, replacement of broken machines, ...) , a 5% transaction fee is a lot.

My boss would answer you that you are undervaluating the chance of attracting potential customer by claiming their attention through an .... bla bla bla

I answer that it is what my boss wants, so shall his will be respected.

y

But they have a much higher Type I and Type II error.

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We are speaking about one or two order of magnitude.

There are examples on the internet of phones with usb mouse+keyboard

Reply to
Nicola Calipari

It seems to me that in a few short hours you have many experts giving you much useful information and guidance with one clear thread amongst them, DON'T DO IT!!!

It would appear that you don't have the experience and capability for such a project, and that's fine. It happens to us all, the difference beween success and failure in this case is whether you choose to still do the thing yourself or go outside to an experienced engineer.

You say this is only for a prototype and your boss wants to see it running for a while, fine. But what happens when the prototype has been successful and your boss says lets do it for real now.

The most likely thing is that you will either not fundamentally change the design from the prototype, which will mean complete and utter and very expensive failure OR you will tell your boss that you have to change the design and it'll cost £$?k to do so. He'll then question why you only brought this up now and most likely the project will be canned.

Please listen to what you are being told.

Dave.

Reply to
DaveN

t

We save a HUGE ammount of money when we will install credit card on some models.

We can reuse existing code thus saving a lot on certification and insurance costs.

Reply to
Nicola Calipari

We don't have CC on the field ATM. I hope this project will be able to change this, in the future.

Transaction value is very low, but volume is high.

I already thought about using another computer for the GUI, with an internal OS, so that the main controller handle just encapsulated call from the GUI, and the user has a filter between him and the microcontroller.

In the slide my boss shown me it said that we hope to have 50 machines with this new system installed before May 2012.

If this sample works we will gradually increase the number of machines with this new controller gradually.

I won't comment on long-term plans, as they are management bullshit. (I hope my boss isn't reading this!! :P )

It amaze me that you know so much about the vending machine business. In fact it happened to us more than a few times, and we hope that the GPS capability could assist us with this problem.

We run an internal test in our company, where I wrote a script to try to use different means to locate the machine if under theft.

One of our maintenance guy stole the machine without knowing about my script, but knowing that it had gps. So he unplugged the main battery and jammed the GPS, but thanks to GSM cells and wifi we were able to relocate it.

I think that this has a huge potential to drive down insurance costs, and maybe even prevent theft.

cheers

Reply to
Nicola Calipari

You don't have to call the credit card companies. You can call your data center. Using WiFi to the CC gateway is just as stupid as telephone.

And drive away others who don't want to mess with video GUI.

If you want attention, put a TV there.

try

To defeat counterfeit notes, your digital scanner needs to be much better than the note printers. Can you afford ulta-resolution scanners in every machine?

Reply to
linnix

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Not arguing again the means, just the ways.

You can interface to credit card scanner with a few K bytes, not M bytes.

Reply to
linnix

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You are completely right. I said this before, but I'll say it again and I'll be more detailed:

This is why I came to comp.arch.embedded:

Maybe the user interface is awful, and I hate the fact that even more spam will arrive in my email now, but I knew that here the technical level is very high, as many of the followers work in the field.

At some point I will send an email to some of the people posting here asking for a quotation about a consulting service.

In the 2000 budget my boss gave me, 800 is aimed toward the purchase of needed hardware, installation, maintenance, .... and the rest is to write any needed software and to have a feasibility plan done by a third party, with indication about how to concretely move this project from testing to production.

Anyhow before directly contacting a firm, I preferred to educate myself first.

Reply to
Nicola Calipari

For some countries there are recommended detectors for

is the ink dry is the paper right weight and reflectivity

are the colours correct

is the printing at a high resolution (any aliases present)

Can a metal strip or other security measure be detected correctly.

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Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
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Paul

I'll elaborate more on the subject. We are oriented toward a Java-WiFi / UMTS solutions for two reason:

1) It is cheaper than a Java-Telephone wire solution

2) The owner of our company, also own a share of a SW company which made this product regarding CC, and thus this force us to use it.

It is not the wisest choice, but I think I can work around it: never complain too much about your bosses choices if you want to keep your job :P if you can, is better to come up with a solution to fix their great ideas.

Anyhow are you sure that CC over WiFi is not safe?

I think it is. SSH is pretty strong nowdays, and there are a lot of implementations which are open sourced and tested widely.

But I might be wrong.

Can you elaborate more on this?

It will not be installed on all model. We don't have any machine with a touch screen ourselves, but some customers prefer to buy them.

It's not that difficult. I live in europe, and the euro has several features to enable counterfeit detection with cheap tools.

But this project

Reply to
Nicola Calipari

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ion why

.

For that reason, my posting email address here is redirected to /dev/ null.

OK, $800 NRE is fine. Since I am already building a similar device for $1500. I still believe 256K flash, 96K sram, telephone uart, mdb uart (with transmitter switch/buffer), usb host (for image scanner) is more than enough for you as well. Just need to add the MDB buffer/ switch and change the layout. Drop me an email at " snipped-for-privacy@live.com" within the next few hours. I don't check this email account very often.

Reply to
linnix

People here are been negative about quite a bit of this because they can see the issues involved and are trying to (politely) educate you so that you can understand better the issues involved.

Consider this also: when the hobbyist of the group also thinks it is a bad idea to use a Android phone, then perhaps it might be time to rethink your approach.

I am confused. Are you planning to run the smartphone on batteries for

1 to 4 weeks without recharging ? Will it be powered on all the time or will it only come to life somehow when a transaction is made ?

If there's mains power to any part of the system, then why can't you take power from that ?

Why do you think that ?

I see 4 boards on the FriendlyARM website. The smallest appears to be the Micro2440 board and the CPU on this board is a ARM920T class device so that means it has a MMU.

I also see now while typing this response that Android and Linux support are both listed for the board I looked at.

You will still need a way of interfacing the USB hub to the Android device.

Let me make this more clear: some of the more expensive smartphones have the USB host hardware installed on them, but the cheaper ones are USB device only. Even if the drivers are shipped with the Android installation, you cannot actually connect a USB hub to a USB device only smartphone.

So that I don't make this all negative, I will also point out that some of the cheap Android tablets (which usually have very old versions of Android installed) do have a USB host mode, but I have no idea what kinds of USB devices are supported by them and I do not know how many devices can be connected at any one time.

You also need to make sure that the device will fully power up automatically after a power failure and that your software will automatically start.

I will also repeat that I consider using a COTS Android device in a commercial product like this to be a really bad idea.

Have you looked at places like Olimex to see if they have anything you can work with ?

Simon.

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Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world
Reply to
Simon Clubley

Just the hardware or someone'e time to design cabling and any associated glue logic and build it and cables etc...

NOT Wifi, at worst mobile data network, or cable. Both need HEAVY physical security as well as any other security.

A mobile data network MODEM can be communicated to over a standard serial port using AT protocols, and is common for machine to machine networks including credit card POS. Were you expecting to simulate web page input or something else. Even encryption can be done with slow processors as the limit is the data network speed for relatively short packets.

Simple tranascations is what is actually used, akin to Chip and Pin in use in various parts of Europe for over 15 years (even an ISO standard for it).

Putting "Multi drop Bus" in Google gives all sorts of entries from first being wikipedia to the fifthe being a PDF about relating to vending industry.

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I dread to think what you were putting in.

You are trying to reinvent the wheel without looking at existing research and standards for doing this.

?????

It can talk to one device (keyboard and mouse as one device running two HID class tasks). Supporting simple HID is a lot simpler than putting on a hub and adding all sorts of other drivers.

I doubt it has ANY drivers for USB hubs and how do you expect to connect an external host controller to the android without loading drivers and some kind of interface to connect it to the android. These devices are usually 100+ pin chips, expecting to connect to PCI bus or similar almost directly to CPU.

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Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
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Paul

If you already have internet, wired data over internet is cheaper and more secured than wireless.

You can still use CC either way, wired or wireless.

I think you can get WiFi monitors/decoders for less than $100, even for secured traffics.

I don't have to decode it, just repeating the data stream. I think I can unload your whole machine with just one payment.

Build your own processing gateway.

Reply to
linnix

Maybe you can break Wireless security... but can you break SSH?

Can you elaborate more on this?

More code to maintain and certify... It's better to outsource this as it is also much cheaper...

Reply to
Nicola Calipari

You have to observe a protocol, and deliver data in a recognised format with handshaking. What is on the data centre end should be nothing to do with the sender. The conforming to how the data is handled is.

Wifi snooping and interception is so easy, especially with a nearer access point of higher power. That is the first of many off the top of my head.

Let alone what you do when your Wifi is swamped with traffic of various forms. Suddenly loads of bluetooth or other devices flood your spectrum.

If we understood why you need SSH in particular would be helpful.

I have not come across an embedded Machine to Machine mobile data network setup that loads that. They might exist but I have never come across them.

You have a contract with your machines to talk to a merchant card service at a data dentre that in turn talks to VISA/Mastercard/major networks for cards credit and debit. You call one number (phone/IP address), not individual list of numbers for each credit card type.

Your merchant card service appears to be your Java Wifi/UMTS.

There will be standard methods of detection only given to authorised scnner people for note readers. Do not try to reverse engineer it there will be security methods, you cannot see unless you know what to look for.

??

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Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
    PC Services
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Reply to
Paul

See the vending machine section at:

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Stephen

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Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@mpeforth.com
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
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Reply to
Stephen Pelc

You are right :)

I tried to be as much polite as possible, even with negative comments, also because there's the further step of the language barrier that prevents me to clearly explain myself.

Anyhow with patience you can get anywhere :)

You have a point :P

No there's a main battery, but the smartphone as an additional battery as a safety measure, and it has been proved very useful.

A few months ago there wasn't this info.. Nice that you pointed me!

so this board:

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has a MMU and can run Java? It would be very nice...

one more question:

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Here it says that:

Power: regulated 5V (DC-Plug: 1.35mm inner x 3.5mm outer diameter) Power Consumption: Mini2440: 0.3 A, Mini2440 + 3.5" LCD: 0.6 A, Mini2440 + 7" LCD: 1 A

So this means that it consume 1.5 W? or maybe in the embedded world the W=V*A law doesn't work?

Obviously I won't use it in the production model, but maybe in a prototype it might work due to its extreme cheapness...

Unfortunately I couldn't understand which boards has a MMU and which doesn't...

I might be wrong but I see that most of them has a very simple cpu, right?

Reply to
Nicola Calipari

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