I've been reading the Hack A Day blog for a while now and have found it rather interesting. For example, the other day they had a post on how to hack a Coke vending machine. I always wondered why they put an LED display on those things just to tell you your soda costs $1.00. It's not as tough the pop market is that volatile where they would have to accommodate daily price adjustments. It turns out after you press the product buttons in a certain order, you can access a debug menu that tells you, among other things, how many items of each unit have been sold and how much money is in the machine on that little display. I tried it out on our machine in the break room and it worked as promised. It just goes to show you that computers running code are everywhere.
Posted by Matthew at January 13, 2005 04:23 PM