Lightning operated chocolate arcade

After the Covid lockdowns are only a faint memory, conferences are back again. Last October I was at the Lugano PlanB Forum with lots of familiar speakers. The talks were good, but not as technical as I would prefer. And last month I was at the Swiss Bitcoin Conference in Kreuzlingen. The talks there were even less technical, but the conference was all in German. That was new for me. I only recently discovered how big the German speaking Bitcoin community grew. So far the Bitcoin community that I was involved was more English speaking. A good percentage was also Swiss people, but since there are also a many expats, the main language has always been English. But that’s not what I want to write about here.
The conference was a FIAT free zone. Drinks and food was all paid with Bitcoin Lightning thanks to the payment terminals from Lipa.
At the conference there were some industry booths. These are always interesting to explore. One that was particularly interesting was Bischof vending machines. They presented an industry grade vending machine with a Lightning upgrade (prototype), that they actually plan to bring to production. They also sold toy LN Candy Arcades with a Bitcoin Switch kit. I had to get one of these!
Back home I flashed the micro controller and configured it. And I modified the candy arcade to operate by the relais from the BitcoinSwitch instead of the coins. It is fairly easy to do, but it is at such a high level that it’s more difficult to diagnose if things don’t work, than working at the lower level that I usually prefer. But since everything was already so well prepared, I did the whole thing without diving into the code. The machine is now in the office at SEBA. So far only few colleagues installed a lightning wallet and grabbed some chocolate. It works most of the time, but I found out that the LNBits demo instance is not always so reliable. And I also found out that it is the most difficult to grab some Lindor, when the ground is fully covered with one layer.