Raspbery Pi based FTC Ticker
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Thanks, got it now hooked up onto one of my Pis that doesn’t get shut down and set it to autostart it on power up.
Now I can let it run for a few days and check it all works correctly.
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It only took it to run to midnight and it stopped due to a typo I made with a variable that is checked at the beginning of Monday.
Today I realised I had forgot to do formatting to allow for values that needed less than 4 decimal places when FTC dropped to 0.04 AUD and screwed up all the formatting on the LCD.
That is now also fixed. Hopefully that has now caught all the bugs.
I’m enjoying playing with the API.
I think my next project will be a ‘Proof in Concept’ on using FTC to pay for credits on an arcade machine.
I don’t have an arcade machine to hook it up to so it will just be a proof of concept and will just trigger a relay to light a LED.
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great idea. Looking forward to seeing your progress. :)
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Humm very interesting :) I think I need to compile some thoughts and get back to you on where this could be taken next :)
Thanks for the code mention
UM
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awesome work! :D
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Humm very interesting :) I think I need to compile some thoughts and get back to you on where this could be taken next :)
Thanks for the code mention
UM
No problem.
I think I’ve got the basics of the coding sorted for the arcade machine to add credits, but there will be a delay on the rest as I need to put together the relay driving circuit and I’m thinking I might use a display to put up the QR code so its not visible when the machine is turned off, to stop people from accidently putting credits in when machine is off like they could if I just used a printout of the QR code.
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Think about what sort of display you want to use! and then re-think what you have in your mind…
Once you have the above, if you let me have the GPIO pins you have spare (thats your hint) I can design the relay circuit for you, but you need to look in to how these things notice a) a coin has been inserted and b) its value… the ATM taught me that a lot of this is done on pulses from the coin taker, and a relay is just not fast enough to emulate that!
I’m around but my time is very limited, but shout up your questions and I will do my best to answer them for you, without taking the fun out of you learning at the same time :)
UM
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Yes the coin taker is the unknown for my project.
At the moment I was going to keep it simple to use it on an old Electromechanical pinball machine as I’m currently trying to find one to buy, and the coin taker mechanism is so much simpler on them than modern stuff. With the old pinball machines if it was the correct size to fit in the slot that was all that mattered and the weight of the coin just moved a contact or microswitch, so for them a relay is fine.
Obviously modern coin takers that check size, weight, use hall effect sensors to determine alloy content of coin ect it will be a different ball game and be a lot more complicated and something I haven’t even looked at yet.
Looks like it’s time to dig through ebay and Adafruit and decide on what will be the best display to use based on size, cost and complexity to integrate.
Building the realy cct is not a big problem, the hardest part will be finding the time to get to the shops to buy the parts.
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If I do add a display I think it will be this one from Adafruit
http://www.adafruit.com/products/1601
Has a touch screen which I don’t need, but its not too expensive and uses SPI, so it doesn’t eat up all the GPIO pins, and best of all there is a good Howto to get it running
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Is there much interest in the FTC ticker?
I see that Cryptsy also has a public API
https://www.cryptsy.com/pages/publicapi
So with a little work this could probably be adapted to show the last trade price on cryptsy
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I have an interest in it but not really to use it as a ticker, more to pinch some of the code for ATM II which I’m hoping to get round to at some point.
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If I get it working your more than welcome to reuse the code
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A friend of mine knows all about pinball machines. He’s the reason i have such an awesome machine.
At his home he has all sorts of pinball machines. The oldest ones not even having digital displays, and the newest ones having a full sized 19" rack-server and an LCD TV as a display.
I asked someone who helps him maintain the machines about the credit-switch as seen on the photo’s on my blog. Apparently all pinball machines use the same mechanism. From the very old ones to the very newest ($10,000 2014 models). The coin checking mechanism is simply a module that goes before the credit-switch, a transistor-relay approach should be fine.
-alex
