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Tech: Hacking your local pop machine..
Wed, 11 May 2005

As everyone knows, I'm pretty into coin operated machines... be they arcade cabinets, classic old jukeboxes, or old Coca-cola machines -- someday I will (wife permitting *g*) pick up one of the old Coke machines that had the vertical column of Coke bottles stacked on their sides behind a little thin glass door. They're expensive, but not too too hard to find. Harder to find is cola in a glass bottle however.. (actually no worries, my wife is very cool with my obscure big-toy hobbies, as long as I keep all my junk out of site *g*)

Anyway, 'hacking' is the honourable (or sometimes mischeavious) act of finding out more about something, while a good 'hack' is a something nifty that has been discovered or built. For instance, a good hack is to make a pinhole camera out of next to nothing, or make a simple transistor radio out of a single transistor. A magazine like Popular Mechanics will feature dozens of hacks in its pages. But here we have some people hacking pop machines of all things! Did you know thse things have a debug mode in them?!

The debug mode isn't really as useful as opening the machine up, but apparently some machines are left in an unprotected state of operation whereby you can coax a 'test' can of pop out. Thats a little unethical, but poking around to ask it to reveal any broken components or perhaps spit out sales stats is pretty interesting. And its a pop machine.. how cool is that?!

I must admit stumbling across this article on hack-a-day, for hacking a Coca-Cola vending machine here. Upon further poking around I found numerous similar articles...

Now, there is a Pepsi machine here to look at, but the 1,3,2,4 sequence doesn't seam to effect it. It doesn't have much of a display either, so it probably predates this hack. Shucks.

In case you're curious, here is one sites view of the History of Pepsi

Here is our Pepsi machine however:

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