- You guys have been asking all sorts of questions
about how ATMs work,
and today we're gonna try and answer as many as we can.
We've learned a lot in the process of making this beast,
The ATM slot machine.
We also (chuckles) have a problem
because it's out of order right now.
The day after we did the meetup
it stopped working. - Surprise.
(laughter)
- Yeah, the ATM is throwing pin pad.
So, we've got a new pin pad on order,
but we have a plan to hook up the bill acceptor,
so that it can become a change machine as well.
Let's start off by just jumping into like
how does this all work,
and how do ATMs work,
and how have we not been spending tons of money
testing this, and how did we ever convince someone
to let us have an ATM?
There's a lot of questions to answer.
There are like three main pieces that you can see
on the outside of the ATM machine
- Card reader, the pin pad, and the LCD display.
- Right, with the buttons on it to select.
And these are just stock ATM parts.
We got these straight out of the ATM.
We bought one of the ATMs like this one
sitting in the arcade here.
We originally bought a machine off Craigslist
that wasn't fully working,
and then we bought a fully working one off of Ebay.
And anybody can buy one,
one of these little machines
that you find them like a convenient store,
anything like that.
- Just like donate a vending machine,
or operate an arcade game.
Anyone could be an ATM operator.
- No restrictions on it.
(laughter)
Then these parts connect to a main board here,
which is just kind of in the motherboard
that runs all the logic. - That half.
- Yep, here.
This is all the stuff we got for the slot machine,
and these are the connectors that go to the card reader,
and the pin pad.
Then this is the connection to the display.
And then down below, is the cash dispenser.
So that's like a conveyor belt system.
It sort of works like a printer.
It's got a whole bunch of conveyor belts and feeders
that feed out the bills.
Then it has a whole bunch of sensors to sense
when those bills have gone by.
Oh, and there's a power supply for the ATM.
In terms of how we integrated it,
we really didn't do very much.
- Not too indirectly, just kind of added on.
- Yeah, so most of the changes we made to the ATM
are just where is stuff mounted.
Internally we've extended some cables and things like that,
but we really haven't like touched
any of the internal logic.
- Yep.
- The only thing I did was change
how the cash dispenser works.
So, instead of spitting out bills,
it instead just tells the slot machine
that bills were supposed to have been dispensed.
So, we're just dealing with the very end of the slot machine
or the ATM experience.
We don't have any access to anything like card numbers,
or pins, or anything like that.
In fact, it would be really really hard for us
to get access to that.
It's all encrypted, and it's actually been a huge pain
just dealing with the basics of that encryption and stuff,
we haven't even tried getting into that.
But just even getting the machine up and running,
there's a lot of hoops you have to come through.
I think the biggest question we're getting is,
how does the money work?
- How does the loop work?
- Right, like how are you guys not losing
large amounts of money?
- Yeah.
- Strange Parts is supplying the quarters right now.
- Our money.
- Right, Ben and I went to the bank a couple months ago
and got several thousand dollars in quarters,
we just withdrew from the bank.
So that's Strange Parts money.
We put, we supply that.
When you do a transaction,
so you put your debit card into the machine,
you type in your pin number,
you select how much you'd like to withdraw.
This machine is connected via ethernet
to a wireless modem down here, which is like a 4G modem.
Once you've put in all your information
it then connects over the internet,
over an encrypted connection
to what's called a payment processor.
And a payment processor,
anybody can sign up for a contract.
You just call them up and you say,
hey, I've got, I bought an ATM,
I'd like to connect to the network.
And you give them your banking details,
so they have the Strange Parts checking account information,
like routing number, account number.
And what that does is when you make your withdrawal,
the money that gets debited from your checking,
your personal checking account
gets transferred into the Strange Parts checking account,
via the payment processor.
And then they take the transaction fee
so that the machine charges
like a $2 transaction fee right now.
We wanna change that to be like a 10% transaction fee
and then allow people to withdraw different amounts.
Right now you can only withdraw $20.
Most of the time we've been using
the debug menu on the machine.
So there is a debug menu where you can tell
the cash dispenser to spit out one bill,
and that is enough to activate the slot machine.
The vast majority of the time
you haven't even been talking to the payment processor,
we haven't been going through all of that.
We've just been getting the motors to spin
on the cash dispenser.
- Do you wanna talk about how it goes,
maybe from the credits upward once you get a credit?
So you do your - Sure yeah.
- ATM transaction, the cash dispenser gives the okay
that you did the withdrawal,
and then that translates into credits
on the slot machines.
You get a signal up to the slot machine portion,
the one that gives you credits.
- And credits are in dollars.
So, you know one credit per dollar.
And then when you pull the handle
that then converts into winner paid depending,
and winner paid is in coins.
And depending on what coins you win,
whether it's quarters or pennies,
right now it's in quarters only mode.
But if we're around and there're friends and stuff,
and we're having a good time,
then we'll turn on the penny, penny mode as well.
- So if you go 20, if you have $20 in credits
that's gonna equal $80 in.
- 80 coins, 80 coins in quarters yeah.
- So then when you do that,
there's a switch on the hopper,
so every time a quarter comes out, it counts down number.
- Correct, yeah.
- Which is a security feature on our side.
So if something happens, it breaks
or it runs out of quarters,
it'll stop at the number of quarters left.
- Right, our biggest fear was that
somebody would do a debit card transaction
and then not get the money that they were owed.
And so we built a bunch of features in.
And unfortunately like slot machines
have the same problem, and so a lot of the hardware
was already there to count coins.
I mean slot machines by law need to make sure
that they're paying out the right amount when somebody wins.
I asked on Twitter for people to send us questions.
How does it contact your bank?
How does it verify your pin and how does it know
you've got coverage for the cash to withdraw?
And that all happens via the ethernet connection
to the payment processor, so.
- The ATM handles all that stuff just like a normal ATM
- Yeah.
Can it be configured to dispense arbitrary amounts
i.e 12 cents.
- Kind of.
- No, yes and no. (laughter)
So what you tell the ATM is what denomination bills
are in the hopper.
And I tried putting in one cents,
so that we could let people withdraw individual pennies.
That's not possible, it requires like whole numbers.
- Whole bill numbers
- Right, but you can put in dollar bills.
- Right.
- We think maybe that that's most used in like strip clubs.
So right now it thinks it's got 20s in it,
but we wanna switch it so it thinks it has ones in it.
And that'll allow you to just withdraw like four quarters
whatever, whatever you want. - Anything, yeah.
- And then we'll switch the fee to be 10%,
so that you're not having to pay $2 fee
to withdrawal one dollar, which is lame.
Someone asks, is there an ongoing cost?
I mean not really.
So we're paying $10 a month for the 4G modem,
and then the processor,
the first processor we had took zero, nothing.
And we think that they make their money
from your bank paying them.
- And send it from the bank.
- Yeah I don't, that's part of the equation
I'm not fully clear on.
Our current payment processor just takes a small fraction
of the fee, of the $2 fee.
So the majority of ATM's that you find
in like convenience stores are Random Dudes.
Like not big companies necessarily,
like they're often individuals
that own a bunch of ATM's around town,
and their job is just to keep the ATM running,
and then to fill it with cash.
And they handle, you know,
dealing with the processing network and that kind of thing,
but yeah, it's often real small,
you know individuals or small companies.
Okay, someone asked about counterfeit bills.
How do counterfeit bills get caught?
And the answer is that the ATM gives no shits about bills.
(laughter)
Whatever you put in it, is what it will dispense.
- Yeah that's why you use an operator.
- Yeah great, it's up to the operator,
and there are some mechanisms,
like if you've got a counterfeit bill from an ATM
you can dispute it.
I have heard, someone said they put in counterfeit bills
and they had some problems with like length.
- Oh just slightly off.
- So I think it does check length just
because there are two sensors that are like
the right amount apart,
and if you have not trigger both of them,
then you've got a problem.
- One of our original ideas was just to fill it up
with pieces of paper and it would just spit out
a piece of paper into a box. (chuckles)
- Yeah, Yeah.
I think the next step is to get into getting this bill,
acceptor up and running.
So the plan is, to at least make it
into a really cool change machine.
- Yes.
- So you should be able to slot, take in your bills.
There are change machines here at the arcade,
that the arcade runs,
but we were thinking it would be cool
if this is a change machine as well.
So it'll work the same as it works now.
- So here's our new bill validator.
It just has six wires coming out.
Two are for power, two are a pulse that you get
for every dollar amount that goes through,
and two are an inhibit mode to turn it off,
so it won't accept bills while other stuff's going on.
So we just gotta hook that up to our main board
and program it up.
- So when it sends a pulse, it connects two wires together.
- Yup.
- And then how does the inhibit work?
Same thing you connect them together?
- I don't know if that's inhibit or inhibit.
- Okay, but you connect them?
- I'm assuming, you can look up the bill evaluator
- Seems like it's asking for five volts,
anything from five to 12 volts in.
- Inhibits it?
- And then ground on the other one.
- For the inhibitor.
- Yeah, I'm assuming that this is the meter set up here.
It's saying five to 12, but we only got 3.3,
so I'm hoping that's enough.
- I guess we wanna just make the connector first.
- Yeah.
So I need to know which pins are which.
- Okay
- So that I can wire this up.
(upbeat music)
RadioShack brand solder.
(upbeat music)
Yeah, so there and there.
I guess I should get all the rest of this hooked back up.
(upbeat music)
Alright.
(ATM beeping)
Let's see, I introduce some programming here, but like.
I think like, tentatively yes, we're good to go.
- [Matt] First step is we could just put power
into this to make sure it powers up.
- Yeah.
- Is it working?
- Sweet.
We're just testing now to make sure that everything
is hooked up properly.
I wrote a little bit of like dummy code
just to turn the switches on and off.
So what pins do you think the inhibitor is on?
- [Matt] Green and red, so that's a.
- The two inner ones.
(activity bustling)
Metal too.
- [Matt] Yup.
(activity bustling)
- Okay.
And do you have a short length of wire
we can short the other two with?
(activity bustling)
It should light that orange LED, which it did.
We're good.
Okay, we have it mostly working. (chuckles)
We did a little bit off camera because there were like
a herd of children in here
and god knows San Francisco parents and children
and camera's don't mix.
So there's one small problem, but it mostly works.
(activity bustling)
- Two small problems.
Sometimes it eats it, but it doesn't actually eat it.
It'll spit it back out, but it takes like 10 seconds
for it to like spit the bill back out,
so I gotta work on that.
I think it's like dirty or something
but it'll spit it back out.
And sometimes it works totally fine.
So it's just yeah.
(buzzing)
(beeping)
- [Scotty] So now its got credits.
Pretty much works as expected now.
(slot machine wheels spinning)
(gentle music)
- Almost the jackpot, we still get paid.
(coins falling)
(gentle music)
- So herein lies the problem,
which is that the right thing is not coming up on the
on the reels anymore, it should be,
I don't even know, it probably should be like
double bars for this one.
And the reels just seem a little bit weak.
And so we tested it with the bill acceptor unplugged
and it works fine.
So we think that it's just the bill acceptor
is drawing too much current for
- It's pushing it over the edge
- The current for our existing power supply,
which was actually the original one from the slot machine,
which is not at all intended to run
what it's now running on.
So it's not all that surprising.
- So I'll just run that separately.
If it will all work, we should be fine.
- Sweet
That about does it, we're gonna go wrap up here,
put tools away and I'm headed off to China in two days.
So I gotta go, move out of the apartment
I'm staying in and things like that.
As always I'm Scotty, this is Matt.
This is "Strange Parts".
If you enjoyed this video,
hit that subscribe button down below,
and I'll see you again soon with some China adventures.
Oh, and you should go check out Matt's stuff
at smallchangearcade.com, right?
- Yeah, and come here and use the machine.
- Great and come down, free gold watch and use the machine.
It should be operational what, tomorrow?
Well by the time this video goes live, it'll be up.
(upbeat music)