I integrated my breadboard (the ccTalk interface), dusted off an AtMega 168 from grad school, and finished the code to poll my coin acceptor. I'm wrapping this project up. I will post more shortly.

TL;DR

Oh darn, I neglected to get a picture of the breadboard, the m168, various screen shots, and the green light on the coin acceptor. I also need to show multiple coins being inserted, and intermixing good and bad coins. So much tech fun.  I love it when a plan comes together. To be discussed in the Next post.

For now, let me show the startup screen of my program. After a successful ccTalk Simple Poll command (P), a confirming checkmark ✔︎ is shown,  the serial number (SN) is extracted, and the master inhibit and the coin inhibit is queried. If good, another checkmark is shown next to ON. The result of the Read Buffer command is shown below the status line; notice that the coin acceptor starts up at event #1, no credits have been seen, and no coins (good or bad) have been inserted, and no coins (slugs) have been rejected:

So there's not a lot of room on these Hitachi HD44760 screens. I spend more time trying to figure out how to condense the information a person needs to see and in a meaningful manner. But most of the time, what's seen is convoluted. For example,  I had to use "ON" to mean the device is not inhibited and there's at least one acceptable coin (not all coins are inhibited.) Again, an example of a tradeoff between space and information.