Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Vending Machines Spit Your Dollar Out”.
Imagine if you will you’re looking for a modest distraction from your soul-sucking job, so you head to the vending machine for a bag of chips and a coke. Your only soulless in the whole world, but the universe apparently hates you and your perfectly adequate dollar bill is rejected over and over again, even though you’ve tried smoothing it out and flipping it over more times than the usb connector in the back, your freaking pc. So how is it? We’Ve mastered intercontinental flight nuclear fission, a crown rack of lamb, but a bill acceptor that always works still eludes our grasp. I mean the people that own vending machines presumably want the money. So why don’t they just take it just take it.
It turns out that bill acceptors have been around since the 1960s and their original design had issues that made them annoying to use for decades to come. The main problem was that they used magnetic heads to scan a bill when it was inserted. These were similar to what you’d find in old audio cassette players see the ink they use to make paper. Money actually contains iron, but it’s not for nutritional value.
It’S so magnetic heads can detect ink patterns on a banknote, to figure out how much it’s worth and to confirm it is indeed money instead of some random piece of paper problem is with all the notes that go through an average vending machine. Those magnetic heads get dirty pretty fast and it’s not like there’s always someone around to clean them off making the problem worse was that older designs had to physically press the head against the bill, so the machine was actually smearing dirt, all over one of its most Important parts not to mention that squeezing the banknote that way made a paper jam more likely, but current technology is better. So why are vending machines still so temperamental we’ll tell you right after we thank brilliant for sponsoring this video brilliant is a website and app built around active learning. That’S accessible and fun trade boring long lectures for problem solving and interactive visuals.
It’S way better. They have over 60 courses to choose from including their new everyday math course get a refresher on foundational math topics. You might not have touched since high school and joined the community of 11 million learners and educators. Today, the first 200 people to head to brilliant.org techwiki will get 20 off an annual premium subscription. Although more recent magnetic bill acceptors use an improved reader that doesn’t need to physically touch that dollar bill. That’S been, god knows where dirt still finds its way to other crucial components. The little wheels that grab and pull your bill through the slot can clog up and break, and the optical sensors used by many newer vending machines to determine if the bill is real or fake can get dirty as well. And in fact, you can see for yourself by trying to use your phone’s fingerprint reader after making yourself a delicious pb j. Some vending machines can actually compensate for a dirty bill slot by increasing the intensity of the light, the optical sensors use, and some of those can even do it automatically if it detects lots of buildup. These advancements have made vending machines play more nicely with paper or polymer, depending on where you live compared to a few decades ago, but they’re still, obviously far from perfect.
There are still enough delicate moving parts for things to go wrong. Just ask anyone who’s ever owned. An inkjet printer, but even if the bill acceptor is super clean, the software still has to be configured properly. Some of them can have their sensitivity, adjusted depending on the time of day, so it might be more likely to spit a bill back out at night when people may be more likely to try and use a counterfeit. Additionally, it needs to be updated whenever currency is redesigned and given how many vending machines just aren’t serviced regularly enough. It’S not exactly surprising that rejected bills are still commonplace in the year of our lord 2022., of course, most vending machines sell fairly trivial items. Like my favorite smoothie ingredients, pork rinds and mountain dew, so a crappy bill, acceptor, usually isn’t the end of the world. The models built into more sensitive applications like atms and casino cache validators, tend to be quite robust and serviced more frequently, so they’re, typically a lot less frustrating to use.
You know we could avoid so much of this if we just used one dollar coins. Instead, god bless canada and bless you for watching this video, like the video, if you like it dislike it, if you disliked it check out our other videos and comment below with video suggestions and don’t forget to subscribe and follow, i tell you this every time. .