This project is still alive and kicking, sorry for being so quiet lately but I'm not one to talk unless I have something important to say.
The original design for this called for it to be "part for part" compatible with the Skyhook.
After getting the first units off the line and performing burn in testing it was found that the the Pi is a serious design problem.
It can randomly "panic" requiring a reboot. I strongly suspect that this is a result of voltage leaking, i.e. RS232 is a 12V protocol and USB is 5v. Whatever the cause, the fact is that the Pi was throwing a kernel panic at random intervals when connected to the bill acceptor. I only found this out when connecting the Pi to a monitor and tailing syslog.
Unfortunately there was no way to indicate this "distress" condition to the user, so the end result was an ATM that randomly decided that it wouldn't take cash.
I went back to the drawing board and scrutinized each part of the design.
In a Skyhook, the Pi is sort of used for everything and the tablet is nothing more than a webbrowser pointed at a webserver running on the Pi. One of the major differences between the Simplicity & the Skyhook is that with Simplicity we moved all of the business logic into the android tablet.
At this point, the Pi is being used solely for interfacing with the bill acceptor.
The only reason for keeping the Pi is that Pyramid does not have an android compatible API.
So I've been writing one, it's not a direct port of their API, but it gives the essentials needed for the android and the acceptor to talk directly with eachother.
The other challenge here was that the Pi also functions to connect the bill acceptor into the system in general.
Physically and electrically, the tablet connects to the Pi and this was how the tablet is being charged.
Removing the Pi and replacing it with a straight through UART (part that translates the RS232 serial port of the bill acceptor to a USB one) means blocking the only port on the tablet that can be used to charge it. Since the UART cannot tolerate the amperage required to charge the tablet, a standard USB hub or even a Y cable will not work here.
Our solution was to design a custom cable and find a cable manufacturer, one who could embed the UART into the cable , while also providing an electrically isolated charging channel so we effectively have a single "smart Y cable".
The cable can detect when the tablet is trying to establish communication with the bill acceptor at which point it shuts off the power flow to the tablet. When the tablet and bill acceptor cease communicating, the cable will resume charging the tablet.
I have some initial engineering samples arriving this week and if everything goes well, they should be in production by the first week of October. Doing this will allow us to rid ourselves of the Pi and the extra complexity it introduces.
Using the custom cable is $10 per unit more than utilizing the Pi was, so this doesn't save us any money. However we think we can still keep the same MSRP, but at the wholesale level it will be a little higher priced. We're still cheaper than a Skyhook though!
I also took the simplicity.gemspace.net domain offline for the time being. Once the retooling is complete, I'll be releasing the full sources to the front end directly on github in hopes of spurring the maker/hacker community to action to make awesome front-ends for these things. Web design was never my strongest suit
In addition to all of that, we've been looking for an exchange partner to provide the currency exchange services. I think we will be having an announcement on that very soon, but I'll invite the exchange partner over to make the actual announce.
On another note, we're reconsidering the Master Reseller arrangement. I can't speak too much about it right now, but the goal has always been to get these into as many hands as possible as quickly as possible. A huge part of that has been to make sure that warranty service issues were handled in a professional manner. I confess though, we have really overbuilt these devices. Every single component is high enough quality that the expected MTBF is over 2x the warranty period.
Unlike previous efforts in this space, we're working directly component manufacturers and assembly houses.
Nothing is being built in house with 3D printers and hand soldering
What this means is that the need for a nationwide network at roll out, probably isn't as pressing as we had anticipated.
Therefore, we may move to a direct sales model, we're setting a pre-order price well below MSRP in order to get the production volume up.
We will be accepting payment in bitUSD for all direct sales, so if you're interested in getting your very own Simplicity Model A+ please contact info@gemspace.net you'll be notified when we're "sales ready".
That's it for now, thanks for your patience everyone!
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