On Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace you can often find beautifully preserved old vending machines. Especially those from the 60s and 70s tend to be built quite robustly. The coin receptor is often broken, missing, or only accepts quarters, so you will rarely see them in action. Most commonly they sit in man-caves, clubs and garages as private fridges.

The irony is not lost on me that the one piece that is broken in these machines is exactly the one we're looking to replace.

We bought this Coca Cola machine, built in the late 60s or early 70s in Kansas City by Vendo, for CA$500 online. They are relatively light (~100kg) and have a somewhat fatal flaw: You can "steal" the beverage by opening it while the bottle is still locked inside and holding a cup underneath it.

That's two reasons these machine were often not deployed outside, and tend to be in good shape. We are only the third owners, Coca Cola sold it to one of their maintenance workers, who sold it to us. The machine runs with Freon, and has never been refilled. The drinks are ice cold. We had to do zero work on the machine beyond transporting it and getting it ready for the Lightning age.

Retrofitting the machine for Lightning payments was really easy. We removed the broken coin receptor and replaced it with a Raspberry Pi Zero and a relay. The Pi listens to messages from our LNbits instance over websockets, and every time a payment is coming through the LNURLp printed on the front of the device the relay is triggered and exactly one bottle can be removed by hand from the machine. The code is open source and available here, and it also includes support for an e-ink display that we plan to add, just to give a visual confirmation of when a payment is coming in.

You can visit the machine and buy various premium soda at the newly opened DCTRL hackerspace in downtown Vancouver, BC at 330 West Hastings Street.

The name of the machine: Nakamoto's Numinous Nerve Nectar