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Comment by kbar13 | Hacker News Reader

uiuc's acm soda machine:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/s...

Caffeine! That was the SIGBOT project for 2001 Engineering Open House - it has had a lot of extra work and upgrades since then. =)

I barely avoided having some sort of terrible lung problems after sanding off the baked on paint from the 1970's Dr. Pepper machine it once was.

Sadly, the old Dr. Pepper machine bit the dust around Spring 2010. It decided to freeze sodas more often than we liked, so we replaced it with a Coke machine in Fall 2010. It was a pain in the ass to get into Siebel, but it provided a nice capacity upgrade, and we no longer needed to do any tricks when loading to prevent the first few cans from exploding. The story I heard was that the original machine was meant for steel cans, so aluminum ones could explode when being loaded if not loaded gently.

Ah, damn. A decade long run isn't bad.

Yeah, we had to load gently, and the thermocouple probably needed to be replaced (if you were exploding cans). The coldest soda in the university though. =)

Yes - it was meant for steel cans. The mechanism at the bottom to output cans was literally an open pair of scissors driven by a giant 120V solenoid.

The only time we exploded cans was by freezing or loading incorrectly. Occasionally we had the solenoids fail to fire, but that was solved easily by sshing into the soda machine and asking it to vend again.

When I was there, the machine controlling the soda machine was a Linux box running some old Debian with a 2.4 kernel, on VIA or some non-Intel/AMD x86 processor, booting from iSCSI. Thankfully, it was upgraded when the machine was rebuilt. How much of this was around in your time there?

Nice work with it. Definitely a staple of the ACM office :)

edit: also, it survived a building move, so that's pretty awesome.

We had some random x86, running Linux, in there on a full sized motherboard. It lived in between the front face and the actual refrigeration compartment. We also had a fun little perfboard of 120V relays inside of a clear plastic case we built - the most dangerous part of the machine (which melted down at least once in the first build).

Man, memories. =)

When avuserow says "upgraded" he means we "replaced it with a not-much-newer HP desktop running Ubuntu", so it's still a random x86, running Linux, on a full-sized motherboard. It lives outside the case these days, though.

Does the coke machine take the swipes from the i-card(I think that's what the id cards are called) like the old one?

It does, and feeds into the same stats database. Unfortunately I can't seem to get to caffeine.acm. I'm unsure how that works these days, since a lot of things were redesigned after I left (including retiring AFS).

When I left in 2011, there was a card reader and a touch screen, so you swiped your card, and then selected your choice on the screen. I think it may have also had a random button at one time or another. The intention was to eventually wire up the physical buttons once again to work closer to a regular soda machine.

For a while, it was wired up to twitter: https://twitter.com/acmsoda

We did have some special "admin" cards for correcting misvends, typically someone's library card or something similar.

We had the physical buttons wired up and replaced the touchscreen with a larger (non-touch) LCD panel circa late 2011. We wanted to get some LCD modules to replace the empty panels next to the buttons, but I don't know if they were ever wired up (I know we built them, but I recall there being a major blocking problem).

I'm amazed the thing kept tweeting a year after I graduated.

the port number was a gag, also used to illustrate sessions we did on assigned-numbers and service discovery.

We did use it for various mechmania sessions as the game communication port. During my time, we also had a running joke that in our "spare time", we would implement a telnet server so you could do maintenance to the soda machine.

Did the soda machine ever use it for anything at all? I never did find a conclusive answer to that.

It did, but it was totally a toy (since it lacked any authentication of its own). We'd occasionally turn it on in the middle of the night and drop a can behind someone hacking away!

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