CR Units

[daverob]

Unless there's some way of fooling the card reader to keep the motor running for long enough to take the card fully in? What kind of encoder is on the motor, can it be disconnected or rewired so that the controller keeps the motor running for longer? What effect does blocking the opto's have on the motor feed?

If you want to go the arduino route, there are many cheaper versions than the Maplin kit. You will need an arduino and a 'shield' for connecting up to the motor. The photocells can be wired direct to the inputs. If you do design an arduino based circuit, then check the pinouts and try to leave any pins that can be used as part of an 'I2C' bus unused. The dongle communicates to the smartcard and reader using I2C communication and so it would be a much simpler modification for the dongle to send an 'eject' command to the arduino using this connection than it would be using a dedicated signal on another pin.

I don't know that much about arduinos, as I come from a generation where you just take the microcontroller chip and program it using it's own machine code, and all of the beginner friendly features that make the arduino simpler to use and program are actually a turn-off for me as they distance me from the parts of the chip that I want to control directly. But I should be able to offer some help with the electronics side of things if you do decide to go this route.

As far as the display and buttons, have you dismantled far enough to check if the display is 2 or 3 digits? They could also be connected to the arduino (or replaced with an arduino compatible 3 digit display) and could show the credit remaining on the card by monitoring the I2C communications and intercepting the reads and writes to the smartcard.

The keyswitch and one of the buttons could be used to add credit to the dongle using the 'External Input' pin on the dongle's expansion connector. Either replace the opto on the keyswitch with a physical switch and wire it inline with the 'add credit' button' or figure out the logic needed for the same functionality but still using the opto.

Using the keyswitch to get into setup mode would have been simpler with the Rev1 dongle (just wire a switch to the jumper pins) but it would still require a power-cycle to get into setup mode. With the Rev2 it's more complicated as you would need relays or similar to make the keyswitch simulate both buttons on the pachinko being pressed (and the power-cycle), or it would require a non-trivial modification to the dongle's internal software. Ignoring the keyswitch for this purpose and using a setup mode smartcard would be a much simpler way for the Rev2 dongle.

The ideas floating around in my head for the Rev3 dongle (if it ever gets futher than an idea!) would be for the dongle to use the I2C bus to communicate with more external accessories, so a remote credit display and extra buttons would be a much simpler addition and the dongle would be able to send commands to control a motorised card reader. Unfortunately this is a lot of work, and I don't have the time for a complete re-write of the dongle's operating system at the moment.