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Day 1: buying the machine and figuring out what's wrong with it.

A project log for Restoration of a vending machine for cans

This project is about a vending machine I bought.

renze-nicolaiRenze Nicolai 05/12/2019 at 12:310 Comments


Day 1: I bought the vending machine, which is a Vendo 75X-5 machine for dispensing 5 kinds of cans from a company in the neigbourhood.

The seller indicated in his ad that there are a number of problems with the machine:
 - The lock is missing
 - One of the trays does not work
 - Display is broken

Upon arriving the seller tried to demo the machine, showing me that the refrigerator part of the machine works. But he could not demo anything else, the electronics seemed dead and not even the TL in the banner on the front worked.

I decided to buy the machine, even with the machine itself completely non-functional.

First things first: I checked the fusebox. One of the fuses seemed broken, bingo! ... or not ... after replacing it still nothing worked. Of course I checked if the new fuse was burned through, but it wasn't.


So... time to check the manual: it contained a full pinout of the controller board.
This allowed me to check the supply voltages, which are 24VAC, 26VAC and 9.5VAC. All of the voltages are there, so that shouldn't be the problem.

The next thing I did was checking the voltage the motors work at. This turned out to be 24VAC, just like available on the incoming power supply plug.

After connecting both the common and the wire of the first tray it started turning, vending can after can! Next I of course verified that the motors of all trays, including the broken (?) one functioned. They all work fine.

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