The motherboard connection
I found out what double dinos means. It means the machine is totally f$5#ed! After C's spirit animal malfunction, more errors followed. Basically the 24 motors in the Venderia went all went berserk. Some were only spinning 1/2 way around, others were spinning 1/4 turns, and some, like the spirit animal coil, were double spinning. As a result, no one was getting what they paid for.
We shut the machine down Wednesday afternoon. Thursday morning we ran a bunch of tests, made a lot of calls, and determined the problem was the motherboard. Replacing the motherboard isn't particularly hard, but it is expensive, and because the Venderia is such an old (i.e. obsolete) machine, tracking down the right motherboard was not easy. But as usual, my local repair buddies came through in the nick of time and saved me moments before I handed over my credit card number to a big distributor in NJ who was about to charge me up the nose for a refurbished board. By Friday at lunch, and with the serendipitous help of some B-land regulars, the machine was back in service.
I never expected to be spending so much time in machine warehouses, or on my knees, headlamp glowing, carefully plugging and unplugging electrical wires, and screwing in circuit boards, but I am. And learning so much. For any potential vending machine entrepreneurs reading this blog, ALWAYS use a surge protector. We're not entirely sure what caused the motherboard to short, but it was probably a power surge. Spending $10 on a surge protector is a helluva lot cheaper than buying a vending machine a new brain.
We shut the machine down Wednesday afternoon. Thursday morning we ran a bunch of tests, made a lot of calls, and determined the problem was the motherboard. Replacing the motherboard isn't particularly hard, but it is expensive, and because the Venderia is such an old (i.e. obsolete) machine, tracking down the right motherboard was not easy. But as usual, my local repair buddies came through in the nick of time and saved me moments before I handed over my credit card number to a big distributor in NJ who was about to charge me up the nose for a refurbished board. By Friday at lunch, and with the serendipitous help of some B-land regulars, the machine was back in service.
I never expected to be spending so much time in machine warehouses, or on my knees, headlamp glowing, carefully plugging and unplugging electrical wires, and screwing in circuit boards, but I am. And learning so much. For any potential vending machine entrepreneurs reading this blog, ALWAYS use a surge protector. We're not entirely sure what caused the motherboard to short, but it was probably a power surge. Spending $10 on a surge protector is a helluva lot cheaper than buying a vending machine a new brain.
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